Ex-nursery worker pleads not guilty over girl’s death in 2017

A former worker of a nursery school in Hiratsuka, Kanagawa Prefecture, pleaded not guilty Wednesday to allegations that she assaulted and killed a 1-year-old girl in 2017.
“I didn’t injure the girl,” defendant Ayako Kaetsu, 48, said in the first hearing of her trial at Yokohama District Court in the prefecture.
In their opening statement, public prosecutors said that the cause of the girl’s death was a traumatic subarachnoid hemorrhage caused by strong pressure applied to the back of the head.
They said that Kaetsu was the only person who was around the girl when the girl’s condition suddenly changed. After the incident, Kaetsu conducted internet searches on the subject of skull fractures, leading public prosecutors to conclude that the girl died because of an assault by Kaetsu.
The defense side said that the girl had been in poor physical health from birth and that her condition had been bad since five days before the incident.
She suffered a subarachnoid hemorrhage more than 12 hours before the sudden change in her condition, so this could not have been the cause of her death, the defense added.
According to the indictment, Kaetsu killed the girl in April 2017 by hitting the back of her head more than once against something hard at the Hiratsuka nursery.
Kanagawa police said that Kaetsu had been assigned to look after the girl. The prefectural police arrested her in 2017 based on security camera images and testimony from a doctor, despite her denials.