DA: 'Monster' mom a 'sadistic, manipulative criminal'
By Margaret Gibbons Staff writer | 6 comments
While several of her friends cried in the audience, an Upper Dublin mom showed no emotion as deputies handcuffed her and led her out of a Montgomery County courtroom Friday to begin serving a prison sentence for abusing her adoptive daughter.
Theresa M. McNulty, 53, of the 600 block of Loch Alsh Avenue, showed the same blank expression when Judge Steven T. O’Neill sentenced her 8 to 23 months in the county prison and to an additional seven-year probation sentence that will begin after she completes her parole time.
It is the same “blank face” to which Assistant District Attorney Samantha L. R. Cauffman referred when she called McNulty a “monster” for failing to show any emotion when blown-up photos of her daughter’s injuries were displayed during the sentencing hearing and for an interview McNulty had with probation officers when she repeatedly called the toddler “my daughter” instead of using her given name “as if she was a possession and not a child.”
“(McNulty) is a child abuser, a sadistic, manipulative criminal who deserves to be punished for crimes,” said Cauffman, noting that McNulty has never shown any true remorse for her actions and has refused to consider herself a child abuser.
McNulty, a single parent who adopted her daughter “out of love” from Russia in 2007, maintained she was not the monster the prosecution made her out to be.
“I love my daughter and the adoption of (using the child’s name) was the best thing I ever did in my life,” McNulty told the judge, saying that she was not an abusive mother.
While she may have made mistakes as a mom that resulted in the child’s injuries, she never deliberately hurt the child, said McNulty, a pale, slight bespectacled woman with brown hair.
The child’s injuries first came to the attention of authorities on Feb 23, 2009, when police were contacted by the Chestnut Hill Hospital staff to report that the then-3-year-old child, suffering severe burns to her face and body, had just been brought into the emergency room by her mother.
McNulty told hospital staff members that the burns occurred two days earlier when she was bathing her daughter at about 3 a.m. after she had vomited. McNulty said her daughter scooted to the front of the tub to rinse out her hair under hot, scalding water, according to the criminal complaint.
While treating the child for her burns, emergency room personnel also observed numerous other bruises on the girl’s body, the complaint said. These injuries ranged from a bruise above and below one eye, across her nose, under the other eye and on the forehead. There also was a bruise to both sides on the top of one ear.
McNulty informed the medical personnel that her daughter, who had an uneven gait, had fallen down the stairs at their home on Feb. 18, 2009, according to the complaint. Hospital staff subsequently contacted police.
During their investigation, police learned that day care employees, family members, physicians and children and youth workers all had observed and/or reported welts, cuts and bruising to the child’s head, ears and face. These observations occurred from April 2008 through February 2009.
McNulty pleaded guilty last October to charges of endangering the welfare of a child and simple assault for the bathtub incident.
Defense attorney Robert L. Adshead said that the guilty plea was not an admission of child abuse but an acknowledgement that McNulty’s recklessness in caring for her child rose to the level of criminal conduct.
O’Neill said it was not up to him Friday to make a ruling on whether McNulty’s actions were deliberate, as Cauffman claimed, or were accidental but reckless, as Adshead maintained.
“This child was abused no matter what you want to call it, abused at the hands of the mother, not only in actions but in the manner in which her injuries were dealt with,” said the judge.
The judge said that McNulty did not take her daughter to the hospital until two days after the scalding accident in which the child suffered first and second degree burns to 10 percent of her body.
The child had to be put on a morphine drip for the pain caused by those burns, according to medical records.
O’Neill, who read a two-inch thick binder containing the child’s medical records, also pointed out that McNulty delayed getting care for her daughter in at least two instances when the child was injured.
The judge called McNulty a “cognitive acrobat” for always coming up with reasonable explanations for the child’s injuries.
As part of the sentence, the judge barred McNulty from having any further contact with the child unless that contact is first approved by children and youth workers and the juvenile court.
The young girl has been living with a foster family in North Carolina where she “is thriving,” according to Cauffman.
Margaret Gibbons: 610-279-6153; mgibbons@phillyburbs.com; Twitter, @peggibbons