Mukesh Prashad is on trial at the Auckland High Court, accused of murdering his daughter Tulsi Amola.
Photo: RNZ / Finn Blackwell
Content warning: This story discusses graphic details of death and may upset some readers
A jury has heard the harrowing account of how a South Auckland father allegedly murdered his five-year-old daughter by smothering her in a car last year.
Mukesh Prashad, 38, has begun his trial in the High Court at Auckland on Tuesday.
He is charged with the murder of Tulsi Amola in January 2025.
Crown lawyer ‘Aminiasi Kefu opened their case by giving the jury their version of what happened that night.
Tulsi had been at a friend’s house playing, and Prashad told his wife he would pick her up.
“Before leaving he smuggled a pillow from their bedroom and took it outside, and he avoided his wife seeing him take that pillow out,” Kefu said.
“He also told his wife that he would go to visit a friend afterwards to give him a gift. That was a lie and that was part of his plan.”
Prashad picked up his daughter and drove her to Highbrook in East Tāmaki, where he instructed her to move into the front of the car.
“He then told police that he told Tulsi, that today they both are going to die.”
Kefu said Prashad used the pillow he had smuggled from home to smother his daughter until she died.
“While doing so, Tulsi said to him ‘Papa no, Papa no, Papa no’,” Kefu said.
Kefu said Prashad moved his daughter’s body into the boot of his car, driving around before returning to the scene of the alleged murder.
He tried to take his own life, unsuccessfully, and drove around before taking himself to the Manukau police station, Kefu said.
“He told the 111 call operator, ‘Hi there, I’m outside the Manukau Police Station, actually I killed my daughter, and her body’s in the boot.”
Kefu told jurors Prashad had been working in Australia and would make trips back home.
While in Australia he contracted herpes, Kefu said.
He spoke about a beach trip taken by Prashad and his family on Christmas Day 2024, where they were bitten by bugs.
Tulsi’s bug bites became infected, and she was taken to the doctor.
It was after that Prashad believed he had somehow infected his daughter with herpes.
Kefu said Tulsi’s body was examined after her death by a pathologist, who confirmed she was never infected with any type of viral, or sexual disease.
But it was this idea that his daughter had been infected with the virus that drove Prashad to murder his daughter, Kefu said.
“He also believed that Tulsi would grow up in pain, and would be socially isolated from her friends and family because of this infection,” he said.
“Mr Prashad then started considering his options of what to do with Tulsi, and he decided that, in order to save her from this suffering, save her from this social isolation, that he would kill her.”
Kefu said Prashad had considered using sleeping pills to poison his daughter, but did not want his daughter to suffer, and settled on suffocating Tulsi with a pillow.
Prashad’s lawyer, Sharyn Green, told jurors it was accepted that Prashad killed his daughter.
“What comes over the top of that is what we call a legal excuse, and that is that he says, at the time, that he was suffering a disease of the mind, and therefore he did not mean to kill his daughter, because of the disease of the mind,” Green said.
She asked the jury to have an open mind, and to scrutinise evidence presented to them by the Crown.
“Listen to all the evidence quite carefully throughout, listen out for the issue of normality or otherwise, and then hopefully we will all give you some guidance at the end as to what to make of it,” Green said.
Green said the one witness called by defence would be a psychiatrist, but that jurors would not hear from them until the end of the trial.
“All I ask is that you remain quite open to listen to all the evidence and not have prejudices at this early stage, and think that ‘this is something that is raised frequently by men and women who seek to get off and get away with murder’.”
The first witness for the Crown was called in the afternoon, Prashad’s wife and Tulsi’s mother.
She cannot be named.
Tulsi’s mother gave evidence of how they met through an arranged marriage, and said Prashad looked after her and Tulsi.
“He was very caring, he was very good, and he used to take care of me and my daughter, ” she said through an interpreter.
She spoke about an incident in 2024 where a neighbour entered their property, and began acting threateningly to a cousin staying there.
Prashad came back from Australia immediately following the incident, and installed security cameras at the house.
After Prashad had gone back to Australia, he would call his wife roughly eight times a day to check in and make sure they were safe, the witness told Green.
Tulsi’s mother recalled noticing her husband’s dramatic weight loss, as well as seeing lesions on his genitals.
She said the physical contact became limited, and the two avoided a sexual relationship.
“When I asked him ‘why not’, he told me that he didn’t want me to get the same condition,” she said.
Prashad’s wife also noticed a change between him and their daughter.
She said he would not kiss Tulsi or hold her hand.
“He used to pick her up but he was not doing that either,” she said.
She told the court about the Christmas Day trip to Maraetai Beach, and recounted feeling itchy in the days following.
Tulsi’s mother found blisters on her daughter’s hand, and scratches from where she had been itchy.
“When Tulsi was itchy and she was complaining about it, I thought it might be a flea bite or an insect bite,” her mother said.
After going to a doctor with Prashad and Tulsi, they were told it was likely the beach trip that caused the bites. They were given a cream and told to put it on the spots, she said.
Kefu took the witness through the evidence of 5 January, her daughter’s last day alive.
The morning consisted of Prashad going to get oats for Tulsi, and some gardening.
The family later visited a flea market for fresh vegetables, and Tulsi was asking if she could go visit a friend, she said.
Prashad and his wife went to help a cousin with groceries, while Tulsi was taken to her friends house by her grandmother.
Later that day, Tulsi’s mother was speaking with her in-laws over the phone when Prashad said he was off to pick up their daughter. He had taken a gift with him, saying he would drop it off to a friend after picking up Tulsi.
The two did not return home.
As the evening went on, Prashad’s wife became scared, calling and texting him to no response.
She had called his friend, who said he was not there.
The witness called the police, and a recording was played for the jury.
She could be heard tearing up in the call.
Pashad’s wife told the 111 operator she was worried his car had broken down.
As questions resumed, she told the court she and three others went by car to try find Prashad, tracing the routes they could have taken.
They visited the friend’s house themselves, and once again called police, before going to the hospital to see if they had been in an accident.
When they got back home, Prashad’s wife lied to her mother that they had found the pair, not wanting to worry her.
Police later arrived at the property to tell the witness they had found Prashad and her daughter, and that her daughter was dead.
She went with officers to the police station, where her brother-in-law identified Tulsi’s body.
The witness was asked by defence lawyer Green, if it were money troubles that had made Prashad take work in Australia, which she confirmed.
His wife said he had not enjoyed being in Australia.
“He was not happy at all there,” she said.
She also said they had trouble paying the mortgage and rates for their home.
“We were finding it hard,” she said.
“The main driver was to give a good future to Tulsi so that she could have better education there, and the other thing was to earn good money so that we had financial stability.”
Green asked the witness about Prashad’s medical history, producing a record of a consult he had with an Australian doctor, discussing lichen sclerosus and herpes simplex.
“He mentioned that he had [lichen sclerosus] on his private parts and that it could be cancerous,” the witness said.
When asked by Green, the witness said she never discussed herpes with her husband.
The trial continues.
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