A Central Florida baby arrived at a local emergency room late one August night with a severely broken leg, an injury so troubling that the hospital staff who cared for her called the Florida Department of Children and Families to intervene.
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Police detectives in two west Orange County cities investigated — the baby lives with her mother in Ocoee but spent that day at her daycare in Winter Garden — but neither could determine how the baby was injured or who was responsible.
But a doctor working with DCF who examined the 8-month-old baby’s hospital x-ray scans told a detective that the girl’s injuries were definitely caused by “an outside force,” according to a police report. “Nothing incidental caused this injury.”
DCF initially seemed to blame someone in the baby’s home, taking the baby away from her mother for more than a month. The girl is back in her mother’s care now, though details of the agency’s investigation aren’t public.
Since the injury occurred on Aug. 21, neither the Ocoee Police Department nor the Winter Garden Police Department have found reason to charge anyone at the daycare or in the baby’s home.
But the mother is now suing All Kidz Preschool on Plant Street in Winter Garden saying the employees’ negligence led to her daughter’s “catastrophic” injury.
The director of All Kidz declined to comment this week about the suit, “out of respect for the integrity of the process and to avoid any misunderstanding or mischaracterization of the facts.”
The lawsuit filed this month in Orange County Circuit Court seeks damages of more than $50,000.
The mother, Mary Isidra Rojas Castro, said her daughter, identified in the suit by her initials, was uncharacteristically fussy when she picked her up at about 5 p.m. from the preschool, which serves children as young as six weeks old. The baby also refused her bottle that evening and refused to settle or sleep, and she “reached for, and clung to, her mother as though she was in desperate need of help and/or comfort,” according to the suit.
Rojas Castro initially attributed the baby’s unusual behavior to normal parts of her development, like teething pain.
But about midnight, after noticing her daughter was not moving either of her legs, Rojas Castro took the baby to the emergency room at Health Central in Ocoee. An exam revealed she had suffered a “complete, displaced spiral fracture,” in her left femur, a severe injury that typically results from twisting force applied at the bone, which can happen when the leg is held or trapped while the body rotates, or when the limb is twisted relative to the body.
Rojas Castro said nobody at the preschool told her the child, who arrived at the facility about 8:45 a.m., was injured, though they had noted she was crying. Employees attributed the baby’s crying to her having just been awakened when her mother arrived to pick her up from the facility. At some point during the day, employees also notified Rojas Castro that her daughter had refused her bottle, but they suggested it was because they were attempting to teach her to eat while sitting upright.
As a result, the baby “was forced to endure somewhere between seven to 15 hours of excruciating pain, distress, and anguish without receiving any medical evaluation, treatment, or pain relief after she sustained a catastrophic injury to her left femur that required prompt medical attention,” according to the suit.
Peer-reviewed medical studies of similar fractures have found that many of the commonly offered explanations for the injuries, including an infant twisting their own leg in a crib, rolling over, or falling a short distance, are are unlikely because they lack the twisting force required to result in a spiral fracture, the lawsuit said. Rather, this type of injury is typically caused by physical abuse, such as “forceful manual jerking, twisting, pulling, and/or manipulating of the leg by an adult or older caregiver while holding the infant near the knee or ankle,” it said.
“For those reasons, a femur fracture in a non-ambulatory infant raises serious concern for non-accidental trauma, is recognized as a classic ‘red flag,’ and warrants careful evaluation, including, where appropriate, investigation by child protective authorities and law enforcement,” according to the lawsuit.
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The baby girl was unable to walk or stand independently, the lawsuit added, and was also not yet pulling herself to a standing position or cruising along furniture.
During a follow-up visit the following day to Orlando Health Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children, Rojas Castro was interviewed by DCF employees who told her they were investigating the circumstances surrounding her daughter’s injury. Law enforcement officers also questioned Rojas Castro that afternoon.
A few days later, DCF and law enforcement officers also spoke with All Kidz employees, who said the baby had not been involved in an incident nor sustained any injuries at All Kidz.
The employees’ insistence that they were not aware of any incidents that could have caused the baby’s injury had “effectively misled” authorities into believing Rojas Castro may have been responsible for the injury, according to the suit.
As a result, the mother lost custody of her daughter from Aug. 25 until Sept. 28.
DCF declined to provide more information about the matter, citing Florida law that protects all records kept by the agency regarding child abuse, abandonment, or neglect from public disclosure.
But records from the the two local police departments show that after interviewing Rojas Castro and employees at All Kidz those agencies declined to file charges against anyone.
Rojas Castro had not been the subject of prior DCF investigations or calls for service to the Ocoee police, according to the law enforcement agency’s report.
Winter Garden first investigated the incident, focusing on the day care, and then referred the matter to Ocoee because that’s where the baby lives with her mother, her mother’s other daughter, the daughter’s boyfriend, and their daughter.
The Winter Garden detective who visited All Kidz a few days after Rojas Castro brought her daughter to the emergency room noted the preschool was “very clean and organized” and the children were well supervised, according to a heavily redacted report from the department. Anette Borrero, the preschool’s director, told the detective they had never had any children injured.
“Anette stressed that the staff treat the children as if they were their own, with some growing with them from 0-5 years,” the detective wrote in his report. Rojas Castro’s daughter had been at the day care for five-and-a-half months before the injury occurred, Borrero told the detective.
The Ocoee report, which includes a summary of information received from Winter Garden and is not as heavily redacted, indicates Borrero said the preschool’s cameras no longer had working batteries, and they had been out of order for four to five months. A Winter Garden detective noted “the lack of video surveillance forces reliance on verbal testimony,” according to the Ocoee report.
“It cannot be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that a crime occurred at the daycare, whether that be negligence from lack of reporting or aggravated child abuse,” the Winter Garden detective wrote in the report for her agency.
Likewise, an Ocoee detective wrote in her report that she did not find probable cause that the baby “was injured at home or that the injury was intentionally caused.”
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