By Calvin Palmer
A 47-year-old father accused of the starvation murder of his seven-year-old daughter had been addicted to valium since the age of 18, a jury in New South Wales has been told.
Dr Kinga Gorondy-Novak treated the family of the dead girl on occasions between 2001 and 2007.
She said the girl’s father was addicted to diazepam, also called valium, and she had been prescribing him 500 tablets a month for about nine months.
She agreed she had offered to help the man to reduce his drug intake, and that he had signed an undertaking to that effect.
“The plan was to reduce the valium intake by one tablet per day per month,” Gorondy-Novak told the New South Wales Supreme Court sitting in East Maitland.
Gorondy-Novak said the man admitted being a “doctor shopper” — a person who consults numerous doctors to secure prescription medication — with one of her colleagues earlier telling the jury he too prescribed the man diazepam.
Dr Stamatios Ktenas, who worked in the same practice as Gorondy-Novak, told the court the father had many health issues, including agoraphobia, anxiety and a panic disorder.
He also said the man had an ongoing history of substance abuse, having been addicted to diazepam since he was 18.
Defense counsel Mark Austin, for the father, asked Ktenas if a report to him from a psychiatrist found the man’s “valium addiction to be as bad as he had ever seen”.
“That’s right,” said Ktenas said, who also said he prescribed valium to the man.
Ktenas did not know the man was obtaining scripts for diazepam from other doctors at the same time as seeing him.
Earlier the court heard the parents ignored the GP’s instructions to weigh the girl weekly.
The man and his 35-year-old wife, neither of whom can be identified for legal reasons, have both pleaded not guilty to the starvation murder of their seven-year-old daughter.
The child’s emaciated body was found in a “putrid” smelling room at the family’s Hawks Nest home, north of Newcastle, on November 3, 2007.
Crown Prosecutor Peter Barnett, SC, asked the doctor what he noticed about the child during a consultation on March 23, 2001.
“She was very thin and emaciated and very gaunt,” Ktenas said.
At the consultation the child weighed 5.2kg, whereas an average weight for a girl that age was 9.5kg, he said.
At another consultation, when the child was 18 months old, Ktenas said the child weighed 7kg when the average would be 12kg.
“I told the parents the child was to be returned for weekly weighing,” Ktenas said.
“Was the child brought back for weekly weighing?” Barnett asked.
“No,” Ktenas said.
The trial before Justice Robert Allan Hulme continues.
[Based on reports by The Australian and Melbourne Herald Sun.]
