10-year-old disabled patient attacked Mount Carmel staff, witnesses say

A nurse accused of beating a 10-year-old disabled patient at Mount Carmel Hospital's youth wing last September has insisted that he did not hit the boy, in spite of the patient's violent behaviour towards him.

Magistrate Claire Stafrace Zammit heard the accused, Brady Bezzina, explain that the newly-admitted patient, who also suffers from muscular dystrophy, had punched, kicked and bitten staff at the facility's Young Persons Unit (YPU) in September 2015.

Bezzina had started work at 7pm on 7 September. “I was told that we had a new patient ... I heard noises coming from the TV room. I found the boy fighting [staff]. I told him to stop and he stopped ... He threw both the pill and the water to the floor. I gave him a fresh pill and then I mopped up the spilt water with a towel.”

Bezzina's lawyer Maxilene Pace contrasted this with the child's account of events. The boy had claimed to have been thrown to the floor and forced to dry the water with his bed linen.

“Later, the boy had attacked other patients, biting, punching and pushing wheelchairs around. He started rocking his wheelchair. We put him in the timeout room - a room where the patient can stay alone and calm down. We didn't leave him in the wheelchair because he could fall out of it, and had done so already.”

“The wheelchair was left outside behind the door of the timeout room,” continued the accused. “We took him out less than 10 minutes later and he started attacking us again, biting, punching.”

The boy had repeatedly verbally abused the staff during that incident, added the witness.

“He told us that he was going to report us and get us fired. He said this more than once,” Azzopardi added. The child was eventually moved to an empty room in the female section. 

The accused said that he had asked the boy whether he wanted to be taught how to get into bed alone and had spent 45 minutes teaching him.

“He succeeded eventually, with some help. At no point did I ever throw him to the ground and goad or insult him [as he had claimed].”

In a previous sitting, the boy had told the court that he washed himself, but the accused had contradicted this, saying that he and a colleague had performed this task.

“How could he have washed himself?”

Bezzina had finished his shift and gone home, he said.

Cross examined by parte civile lawyer Andre Borg, Bezzina insisted that the boy had no bruises when he washed him.

“As a nurse, my job includes looking out for these types of injuries. There were none.”

The boy cannot walk, is wheelchair-bound and needed help to go to bed, the lawyer pointed out.

“How could he be violent?”

“The boy is strong and he can bite,” the accused shot back.

The child had been placed on the floor as he was rocking his wheelchair from side to side and risked falling out of it, explained the accused, who said that he had continued to monitor the child in the timeout room through CCTV. The cameras were only for monitoring purposes, however and the footage was not recorded, said Bezzina, adding that he was not responsible for the recordings.

Marion Saliba, the nurse in charge of YPU, also testified today. She told the court that washing the boy in his bed was a necessary measure due to the fact that there were no facilities for washing wheelchair-bound patients on that floor.

When she had taken a handover the next morning, she was told that the boy had been aggressive and abusive and had been given a time out. His mother came to pick him up at around 4pm, she said.

“In the meantime we had found him hitting the wheelchair against the wall. The patient was unhappy at being held there. At 3:30pm I went to check on him and the boy told me 'the nurse hurt me.'” But after she warned the boy to tell the truth, he had tried to hit her with the wheelchair, she said.

A male colleague of hers had stopped him.

“When his mother came to pick him up, he had showed her a bruise on the side of his upper torso. The bruise was bluish in colour. His mother started prompting him, asking him whether he was punched in the head, face. He then said he was punched in the mouth, but had no visible injury there.”

Kris Sigerson, who worked at the YPU at the time, was next to testify.

“The next day, the boy did not complain for the whole day. I remember the boy asking the accused to stay a little longer as he was going home after his shift,” said the former employee. He told the court that he had heard the boy speaking to Saliba, corroborating the previous witness' account, adding that he had deflected the onrushing wheelchair.

With regards to the bruises, he said the boy would bounce himself from side to side on the wheelchair when he was anxious.

“He even started doing it in front of his mother.”

“I was in the TV area and for some reason the boy attacked the nursing officer, Marion Saliba,” said nurse Edmond Bianchi.

“He was going to bite her at one point. Kris had held him back as he was going to seriously injure her. The boy was constantly fidgeting ... at one point he was going to fall over.”

In his submissions, lawyer Andre Borg argued that the bruises had already started to discolour when they were photographed, indicating that they had been there for some time.

“The victim's version had been corroborated in full,” Borg said. “When he says the truth, he says the whole truth.”

Maxilene Pace reiterated that the accused had not been at work during the alleged incident. The boy had not even known the accused's name, she said, but had been told it by the mother.

The boy had testified to being able to stand up unassisted but had been shown to be unable to and had claimed to have bitten a staff member's finger, but this was also shown not to have taken place.

“Just because Brady had not seen the bruises didn't mean that he had caused them,” argued the lawyer, adding that the internal investigation at the hospital had revealed the bruises to have been caused by the wheelchair itself.

“He rocks violently in a restraining structure, and has bruises corresponding with that structure. The charges should not stand,” the lawyer said, closing submissions.

The court will deliver its judgement in July.

Police inspector Sandra Zammit prosecuted.