A Dandenong woman who brutalised a relative, including trying to slit her throat with a blunt knife, has been jailed.
Leanne De Baize, 43, pleaded guilty at the Victorian County Court to intentionally causing serious injury, making threats to kill, theft and unlicensed driving.
De Baize’s attack occurred in the relative’s home in the South East in February last year.
She was under a drug-induced psychosis at the time – which showed the tragic impact of drugs on families and vulnerable elders, Judge Patricia Riddell said in sentencing on 25 September.
De Baize had told police something on the phone or TV told her to keep the victim hostage and her ex-partner was telling her to make a beheading video.
She believed other people were killing the victim’s other family, that the country was being taken over by other nationalities and that her own phone and brain were hacked.
At one point, she made the victim get on her knees in front of the TV, making her repeat words as part of a threatening act
She tried to cut the victim’s neck with what appeared to be a bread knife and later used a smaller knife from a kitchen drawer and stabbed the screaming, crying victim to the shoulder/neck area and body.
“It’s enough, I’m dying Leanne,” the victim said at one point.
During the ordeal, De Baize struck her relative to the head with a heavy marble placemat, and tried to suffocate her as well as trying to strangle her.
She tied up the victim’s hands, and twisted and broke one of the victim’s fingers.
Family members knocked on the locked front door. They heard the victim screaming for help, and saw De Baize escape out of the side gate.
The relative was taken to The Alfred hospital with multiple bruises, a penetrative cut to her neck, concussion and PTSD.
For more than a year since the incident, she continues to suffer vertigo and dizziness, memory loss, panic attacks and nightmares, depression, and pain to her shoulder, back and wrist.
She no longer feels safe at home, she told the court. Meanwhile, the two, once-close families had become estranged.
Soon after the attack, De Baize returned and stole the relative’s car. She was spotted by the victim’s son driving in Dandenong North.
“Tell your mum to drop the charges,” De Baize told him.
“Just say she attacked me and I went for her.”
He told her she needed to give herself up. She was arrested that morning.
De Baize was unfit for a police interview due to auditory hallucinations, coming down from the drug ‘ice’ and agitation.
While on remand, she told her sister in a phone call that it was an “impulsive” act and “wasn’t because I was on drugs”.
In sentencing, Judge Riddell said that De Baize’s drug-induced psychosis at the time was not mitigatory. This was because there was no underlying mental illness.
It had been an “enormous breach of trust” on a close relative who had loved De Baise and only ever been kind to her, the judge said.
She noted De Baize’s lack of relevant priors, her remorse as well as long-term impacts from childhood abuse and a violent ex-partner.
De Baize was jailed for six-and-a-half years with a four-year non-parole period.
She is scheduled to face a contest mention at Dandenong Magistrates’ Court on 21 October over an alleged hit-run crash into a cyclist in Noble Park.
