Testifying from a hospital bed, a woman accused of murdering her tiny daughter in a suicidal leap sobbed as she told jurors a story of abuse by her husband and his family.
Farinoosh "Roya" Dalili said Tuesday she was driven to try suicide by the physical, verbal and sexual abuse but insisted she did not take 3-year-old Nagen Natalie Dalili when she jumped from a 10th floor hotel room."I loved my daughter with all my heart. I didn't take my daughter out the window," Dalili said.
Her attorney, Alex Kessel, contends the child was so attached to her mother that she followed her out the window. Dalili, who has 200 pins holding her splintered bones together, has been in a hospital bed throughout her trial.
Dalili, 31, speaking clearly through a microphone in the hushed courtroom, recounted an ordeal that began after she left Iran with her family at age 15, emigrated to Canada, earned a college degree and came to California.
She was waiting, she said, for the right man to marry. But in Iranian fashion, her marriage to Nader Dalili, a wealthy businessman in Los Angeles' garment industry, was arranged by their families.
At first she was charmed by Dalili, but the relationship soured. When she became pregnant, she said he asked her to find out the baby's sex and, after a sonogram, she came to his office with a balloon announcing, "It's a girl!"
"He said, `You must be joking. Go back and do it again,' " she testified.
He began hitting her and sodomizing her, and pushed her down a flight of stairs when she was eight months pregnant, she said. But worst of all, she said, was the mental abuse by him and his fam-ily.
"The entire family put a lot of pressure on me emotionally, and gradually it destroyed me," she said. Divorce was not an option in an Iranian family, she said, and so she decided to kill herself. She slashed her wrists and tried to inject air in her veins.
"He always mocked me and said, `You're doing this for attention. If you really wanted to kill yourself you would go and jump from a high building,' " she testified.
The day that she did, Dalili said, "I was not myself. I hadn't eaten or slept. I had no emotions. I was like a robot, a zombie."
She rented a room on the top floor of the Torrance Marriott Hotel on March 3, 1997, and remembers seeing an open window. She said she remembered sitting on the ledge but did not recall the fall.
Prosecutor Alex Karkanen, who contends that Dalili cradled the child in her arms as she jumped, pointed out that in an interview with prosecutors she had said, "I know that now, that I took her with me."
Nader Dalili has testified that he was a loving husband and father and never abused his wife.