Anahera Janine Te Aroha Ross-Lewis

Laying her tear-streaked face gently against her little girl's chest, Kahurangi Ross counted the toddler's heartbeats, praying that they would keep going. Three-year-old Anahera was critically ill with severe brain injuries after being punched twice in the head by Kahurangi's partner, Warwick Kershaw. On the night of the abuse, Anahera had been crying with pain from a burned hand after Kershaw (then 25), cruelly pressed her palm against an oil heater as a punishment for playing with it. Frustrated by the little girl's tears, Kershaw then landed the two blows that would end her young life. For a week, the tiny child had battled for survival in Wellington Hospital's intensive care unit with a devastated Kahurangi at her bedside. With no hope of recovery from such terrible injuries, the doctors decided to turn off Anahera's life support and, after two days, the courageous little girl finally slipped away while cradled in her distraught mother's arms. For Kahurangi, and for Anahera's biological father Terrance Lewis, it was a nightmare made real. "Words cannot explain how painful this moment was for us," says the grief-stricken mum. At the time, Kahurangi, a midwife from Palmerston North, had a nine-month-old son, Te Au ooko, and was six months pregnant with her second son Awatea - both fathered by her daughter's killer. Speaking openly about Anahera's death in the hope of saving other children from violence, Kahurangi insists she never in her wildest dreams imagined Kershaw was capable of doing something so vile to her daughter. She had entrusted him with Anahera and her brother Te Au ooko that fateful night while she went to work. "When I got home at about 11pm, I went into Anahera's room and gave her a kiss, thinking she was asleep. The next morning, she was unconscious. I knew something was wrong and I was in a panic because I didn't know what it was," she says. Kahurangi called an ambulance, which took Anahera to the local hospital. The doctors there immediately transferred her to Wellington's intensive care unit. While at the hospital, Kahurangi had seen the medical staff talking to each other and, although she couldn't hear their words, she could read their lips. "The doctors were saying they could take her to Auckland but she would die on the plane, so they had no choice but to go to Wellington," she recalls. "That's when I first realised how serious the situation was." once in Wellington, Kahurangi was told she had to be interviewed by police and a representative of Child, Youth and Family because they believed Anahera's injuries were non-accidental. "I was shocked because I realised that they thought I was hitting her," she says. "But I had nothing to hide. "At that time, Kershaw had said nothing about what had happened and it was only when police were about to question Kahurangi that he finally confessed to causing Anahera's horrific injuries. Kahurangi was shocked to the core by what Kershaw told her about that life-shattering night in May 2003."I felt like my heart had been ripped out," she says quietly, the pain as fresh now as it was seven years ago. "It meant the end of any relationship with him." Warwick Kershaw later admitted in court that a combination of the possibility of losing his army job and the stress of looking after the children made him snap. Kahurangi says, "He always maintained that if he had known that it was going to cause so much damage, he wouldn't have done it. I said to him, 'Your intention was to hurt her, but not to kill her? How is that different?'" Kershaw was convicted of manslaughter and served only 18 months of a three-year jail term - a sentence that outraged many people around New Zealand. But Kahurangi's sentence is for life. She has lost her little girl - the child she named after the Maori word for angel because she brought new happiness into the family after Kahurangi's brother, his girlfriend and their baby died in a car crash just weeks before Anahera was born. Source: https://www.nowtolove.co.nz/news/real-life/my-partner-killed-my-lit...