By: Kheng-Liang Tan
In a case of child abuse which outraged the nation, a man was sentenced to 6½ years imprisonment and 6 strokes of the cane today (19 Sep) after admitting to causing grievous hurt and 3 counts of ill-treating a child.
Franklie Tan Guang Wei started to abuse his girlfriend’s infant son after they got together around Aug 2014. Subsequently, a caregiver refered the case to the Ministry of Family and Social Services.
Eventually, the MSF placed the boy in his grandmother’s care under a Voluntary Care Agreement. Under the agreement, any contact the boy had with his parents had to be supervised by his grandmother.
However, his grandmother had breached this by bringing the boy to Tan’s flat on 8 Mar. That night, Tan was so agitated by the boy’s cries that he threw the infant to his mother who was 2m away.
On 25 Mar, the boy’s mother had gone to work when the boy vommitted. Tan was fustrated and pushed him off the bed with excessive force, which resulted in the boy landing on the ground 2m away with a broken skull.
His mother rushed back and the boy was sent to KKH and surivived emergency brain surgery. There, they found him with host of other injuries, including: wrist and collarbone fractures and bruises on the body and his eyelids.
He is now under foster care.
District Judge Hamidah Ibrahim said that the acts of abuse “were committed against a defenceless and vulnerable child… His only crime was the fact that he cried, a natural thing for him to do at his age”
The boy’s mother will be charged next week with 2 counts of permitting Tan to ill-treat the baby.