A MUM killed her toddler daughter and then tried to kill herself.
Now a major inquiry is under way in Kirklees into the case of schizophrenic Sonia Bellfield, who suffocated her daughter just two days after a health worker decided it was safe to leave the tot in her care.
Bellfield, 31, killed two-year-old Jasmine because she feared the FBI was coming to get her.
She then stabbed herself three times before taking an overdose of the anti-psychotic medication she had failed to take for three months.
Bellfield has been detained indefinitely in a secure mental unit.
A Serious Case Review into the tragedy has been launched by the Kirklees Safeguarding Children Board.
Bellfield, of Naylor Court, Dewsbury, pleaded guilty to manslaughter with diminished responsibility when she appeared before Leeds Crown Court.
It emerged she had been visited by health professionals before Jasmine’s death.
The court heard that on February 17 last year, a health visitor referred her to a crisis team. But she “didn’t regard it as an emergency”.
The next evening, two psychiatric nurses visited but got no answer and decided to return the next morning.
When the crisis team came the next day to take Jasmine into care, it was too late.
Bellfield, who has a history of paranoid schizophrenia, told them: “I have killed my baby.”
It transpired she had put her hand over her daughter’s nose and mouth, smothering her.
She then took an overdose of her own anti-psychotic medication before lying down next to the body of Jasmine and stabbing herself. She later went downstairs.
Police who were called to the house the following day found her covered in blood and the body of her daughter in a bedroom.
The court heard that Bellfield’s mental illness possibly stemmed from smoking cannabis at an “early age”.
She had been treated for mental health problems from the age of 19 and had spent three years between 2002 and 2005 as an outpatient at the Priestley psychiatric unit at Dewsbury District Hospital.
But she had not been seen by a psychiatrist since 2006, even though in December 2009 she had asked to be referred to a mental health team.
Social services closed the file on her in 2008.
The judge, Mr Justice Butterfield, said she was clearly “ a devoted and caring mother” and described the case as a “tragedy and a terrible event”.
Det Supt Dave Pervin, of West Yorkshire Police, said it had been a sad case that had touched all the investigating officers.
Kirklees Safeguarding Children Board is carrying out a serious case review and said it could not comment.
