Serial offender Margaret Mabel Dodds has admitted sitting in Sydenham’s Bradford Park and thinking about what she could do to a nine or ten-year-old boy who was playing with a soccer ball.
Dodds says she wasn’t loitering near the boy in breach of her intensive supervision – she was there to swallow pills and take her own life.
When the police were alerted to the August 19 incident and arrived at the park, they had to call an ambulance because 60-year-old Dodds had taken the pills.
Dodds has achieved notoriety on social media in Christchurch for her loitering around parks and public places where she faces a sheaf of trespass orders.
Bradford Park is one of the few places where no trespass order applies to her but she was under an intensive supervision order that bars her from any contact with children. She has served jail time for her repeated offending with trespasses and assaults, and this offence occurred not long after her latest release.
Dodds, who normally lives at Princess Margaret Hospital’s Seager Clinic, was taken to hospital after her overdose on painkillers she had bought at a Beckenham supermarket, her judge-alone trial before Judge Brian Callaghan in the Christchurch District Court was told today.
Interviewed later, she admitted she had sat on a bench in the park and had watched the boy playing with a ball. She said she had been “thinking about what she could do to the boy”, according to the probation officer who interviewed her.
A woman going through the park with her own children recognised Dodds from the frequent warnings on social media. She told the court she spoke to her, and told the boy it was not safe to remain at the park and he should go home because the woman was “not kind to children”.
She also alerted the police.
Dodds denied the charge of breaching a condition of her intensive supervision by lingering around the boy in the park. Defence counsel Kirsty May argued that “to watch is not to linger”. She said Dodds had gone to the park to commit suicide and was not lingering there because the boy was there.
But Judge Callaghan found the charge proved after the one-day hearing. He found that Dodds had been “lingering for the purpose of keeping an eye on the boy, and was considering what she might do to him”.
Prosecutor Courtney Martyn said the Crown was seeking that Dodds be jailed for the offence, but it did not oppose bail pending sentencing, which has been set for March 23.
Judge Callaghan granted bail and asked for a pre-sentence report to consider Dodds’ suitability for home or community detention under which she would be electronically monitored.
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