Two daycare workers in Missouri have been charged after a video showed one of them throwing a 3-year-old girl against a cabinet.
Wilma Brown, 27, the woman who allegedly threw the girl, was charged with felony child abuse on Feb. 28. The incident took place on Feb. 1 at Brighter Day Care and Preschool in St. Louis.
The girl, who has not been identified, had to get seven stitches in her forehead at the hospital due to the incident.
If the video hadn’t surfaced, the family would have believed the teacher, who wrote a note claiming the injury was from the child falling.
Warning: Video contains footage that may be disturbing to some.
“In no world did this family have any idea that what was called a fall was actually an assault until they came to see that video,” Jennifer Hansen, the family’s attorney, told Fox 2. “One of the more egregious aspects of this case is that the daycare director told the family that she did not watch the surveillance tape until the family was with her.”
The footage was obtained by a family member of the girl.
Brown was at-large as of Thursday night while another worker, 22-year-old Ariana Silver, was arrested for a separate case of child abuse.
Silver, in another incident captured on video, squeezed a 4-year-old girl’s arm so hard that the girl suffered “puncture wounds,” according to charging documents obtained by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Silver also carried the girl by her foot.
North County Police Cooperative Assistant Chief Maj. Ron Martin said Silver was trained by Brown.
I found past violations involving kids getting hurt at this same daycare, including a 2016 case in which a DHSS inspector noted a “child fell out of the chair and sustained a left femoral fracture.” https://t.co/wTJ6FwebfQ via @fox2now
— Chris Hayes (@ChrisHayesTV) February 27, 2019
“It’s heartbreaking to watch,” Martin said to the Post-Dispatch of the surveillance videos. “If any parent has had a child enrolled there and they’ve experienced something similar, where a child came home injured, we’d like to hear from them.”
The daycare has been under investigation multiple times since 2013, he added.
Kiara Graham, whose daughter was pinched by a worker at the daycare, said she saw video of a worker throwing a child. It wasn’t clear if it was the same 3-year-old or another child. She said she reported it to the police.
“It was shocking. As a mother, you feel helpless because you want to protect your child. So to see anything like that is heartbreaking,” Graham told KMOV.
Graham said charging two employees is a good start but that there should be a probe into the daycare and the owner.
HORRIFYING: Surveillance video shows day care worker throwing 3-year-old girl across room and against cabinet https://t.co/DBhI662sli
— ABC7 Eyewitness News (@ABC7) February 28, 2019
Child Abuse
According to a report published by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (pdf), approximately 3.5 million children nationwide in 2016 were the subjects of at least one maltreatment report to authorities.
“Child abuse is one of the nation’s most serious concerns,” the authors wrote in the introduction.
About 17 percent of those reports were substantiated; the department said that there were an estimated 676,000 victims of child abuse and neglect, or 9.1 victims per 1,000 children. Children in their first year of life had the highest rate of victimization at 24.8 per 1,000 children of the same age in the national population.
About three-quarters of the cases were neglect while about 18 percent were physical abuse. Some children suffered from multiple forms of maltreatment.
Of the perpetrators of the abuse, more than four-fifths were between the ages of 18 and 44 and more than half were women.
