Tutor who saw injured maid: I was too scared to help

The picture above shows the area where the maid landed after falling
 from the second-floor unit where she was allegedly raped. A part-time
 tutor saw the maid from the window but what she saw frightened her
so much that she did not dare to go downstairs.

SINGAPORE - When the part-time tutor received a call from a student living in the same block about a woman falling to the ground floor, she ran to the window to look.

But what she saw frightened her so much that she did not dare to go downstairs.Instead, she passed a piece of cloth to her 20-year-old daughter, 17-year-old niece and a female student, and asked them to cover the woman, a maid, lying naked on the ground.

She told the court: “I asked my daughter if she dared to go downstairs and cover the woman. I was scared.”

The girls later covered the injured woman with a green sarong.The tutor
testified yesterday at the trial of a 42-year-old former security guard.

He faces five charges - two counts of aggravated rape and one count each of attempted murder, voluntarily causing hurt and trespassing.

The man is accused of raping the maid in the master bedroom and the children’s room before choking her with a raffia string and throwing her out of the kitchen window of the second-storey flat.

The parties cannot be named to protect the identity of the maid, who is now 29.
The alleged offences occurred between noon and 2.32pm on Sept 9,
2009.

Phone call
The tutor was teaching some children in the kitchen of her third-storey unit when her 15-year-old student phoned her to say that an Indonesian maid working for a family on the second storey had fallen to the ground floor.

Her student lives next to the unit where the alleged rape took place. Both she and her maid took the stand yesterday.

The student’s Indonesian maid told the court with the help of a translator that she had heard a female voice shout “tolong” (Malay for help) at about 2pm.

“From the accent, I could tell it was an Indonesian,” said the maid who has worked in Singapore for three years.

“Then there was complete silence for one or two minutes and a shout of ‘Ahh’ loudly.”
She then heard a window grille being opened loudly and the sound of bamboo poles breaking.

Curious, the petite maid stood on a 25cm stool in front of the kitchen window in her unit to see what had happened.

The court heard that she saw a naked body when she looked down and she ran to tell her employer’s daughter in her bedroom. They then went downstairs.

The teenager told the court yesterday that the woman was murmuring to herself and groaning in pain. Seeing this, she quickly called her tutor, who then sent her daughter, niece and a student downstairs to cover the naked woman.

Groaning in pain
The tutor’s daughter said of the victim: “She was saying “sakit sakit” (Malay for pain) and groaning in pain.

“I asked her... how she fell, where she lived and if she had been pushed... but got no response.” She added that she noticed a bamboo pole lying beside the maid and a bent bamboo pole hanging from the window of a second-storey unit.

She also told the court that she saw a raffia string hanging loosely around the woman’s neck and a deep cut below her chin.

The tutor’s other student, who is studying in a polytechnic, told the court that while she was at the void deck, she saw a man walk towards them and found his behaviour strange.

She said: “He appeared out of nowhere, it was very sudden... He observed from a distance.”

She added that his facial expression led her to believe that he knew that something had happened, but when she looked away for a moment, he had vanished.

She left the other two girls to look for the unit where the incident happened and found its gate and wooden door ajar.

When she peeked into the unit and saw that a statue had fallen over, she rang the doorbell, but no one responded.

She entered the flat and found it in a mess with a T-shirt and bra lying on the floor near a cupboard.

The court also heard that she saw the man she had earlier seen being handcuffed and led away by police officers.

Defence lawyer Kanagavijayan told the court that their case theory was that the maid had not lost consciousness during the incident.

She had then run to the kitchen to escape her assailant, taking her underwear and shorts. But finding them stained with semen, she decided to wash them in the kitchen sink.

She then jumped out the kitchen window naked as her clothes were wet, Mr Kanagavijayan added. Deputy Public Prosecutor Charlene Tay told the court that checks will be made to see if the underwear and shorts seized as evidence were sent to the dryers as wet clothes have to be dried, otherwise they would turn mouldy when stored by the police.

The trial continues today.

Of the charges, attempted murder carries the heaviest penalty - a life term and caning if the accused is convicted.

If convicted of rape, he can be jailed 20 years and caned.