Canadian mother admits to drowning autistic daughter

From The Toronto Sun:

A petite, mentally ill woman expressed love and remorse for the four-year-old autistic daughter she admitted drowning six years ago.

“I love Scarlett but I hate autism,” Xuan “Linda” Peng (pictured) said after she walked to freedom two hours after pleading guilty to manslaughter.

The 38-year-old woman, who was diagnosed in 2002 as being bipolar, was sentenced to the equivalent of five years plus one day for the homicide of Scarlett Chen, her four-year-old, on July 12, 2004.

“This is the most stupid thing I’ve ever done in my life,” Peng told reporters outside court. “I will feel great regret for the rest of my life. I will be a very good mother.”

Peng said her daughter was “a very beautiful baby, very strong and tall, with long legs.”

Peng repeatedly told Justice Ian Nordheimer that she wanted to bear more children and wouldn’t kill “another baby.”

Peng “reacted under pressure in a most appalling way ... but she didn’t do so under any evil ... intention,” said Nordheimer, who also ordered that Peng serve three years of probation and maintain psychiatric treatment.

Peng wasn’t prohibited from being alone with children because she “doesn’t represent a threat to children,” Nordheimer said.

Crown attorney Joshua Levy said Peng should have been protecting her vulnerable child and instead killed her. Peng “snapped” while caring for her autistic child for the first time in almost three years that day at her Rosebank Dr. home in Scarborough.

“Peng, at her wit’s end after a day of bad news and the extreme stress of taking care of her autistic child, snapped. In a moment of frustration and anger, Peng held Scarlett’s head under the water for some time,” Levy said in reading an agreed statement of fact.

When she realized Scarlett was unconscious, she pulled her out of the tub and attempted to revive her. But it was too late and Scarlett never regained consciousness.

“In shock, feeling guilty and not wanting her husband or mother to know what she had done, she placed Scarlett’s body back into the tub full of water. Peng waited downstairs, watching TV and waiting for her husband and mom to come home,” Levy said.

On the same day of Scarlett’s death, Peng, her husband, David Chen, and her mom, Li Ning, heard some crushing news from a Scarborough doctor. He told them Scarlett’s condition couldn’t be cured by surgery and that she would never function normally and would require assistance throughout her life.

“Obviously nothing we can do can bring Scarlett back,” Crown attorney Kim Motyl said. “This was the first time we had heard from Peng about what really happened in that bathtub.”

Last year the Court of Appeal overturned a 2008 conviction for second-degree murder. Peng had served 30 months of a life sentence and was given credit for five years.

Peng, who was born and raised in China and studied civil engineering, married high school sweetheart Chen in 1995. Scarlett, born in January 2000, was their only child. In September 2001, they sent the 20-month-old girl to China to be raised by a grandmother. In March 2004, Scarlett returned to Canada with her grandmother, who remained the primary caregiver.

Chen and Peng are now divorced but remain friends.