A daycare worker was caught on camera hurling a shoe at a 5-year-old girl with special needs in Los Angeles — and now her furious mother is demanding answers.
The girl was at the Destiny Development Center in Inglewood on Jan. 16, where surveillance video showed the unidentified worker removing her shoe and chucking it at the child, who cried after being hit.
Two other employees witnessed the incident and appear to laugh.
The girl’s mother, Michelae Jones, told KTLA that she was shocked to learn of the attack on her child.
“I’ve been with these people for three years,” she said. “I really thought my baby was safe with them.”
Jones said her daughter told her about the incident, prompting the mother to contact the daycare center’s director. She said staff was slow to respond.
Jones was not allowed to see the surveillance footage for more than two weeks, according to KTLA.
The girl’s aunt, Kira Townsend, said she has many questions about the center’s safety protocols and operations.
“How do you have a business and you don’t review the footage unless a parent says something?” Townsend told KTLA. “Why do we have to wait for my niece to come and tell us, ‘Hey, my teacher hit me in the ear with a shoe.’”
The daycare center’s director, Danielle Williams, reportedly told Jones that she was looking into the incident.
She later said the caregiver was “throwing shoes into another room… and [the child] accidentally got hit in the head with the shoe,” according to KTLA.
“My school, what we stand for, it’s not child abuse,” Williams said. “We don’t hire child abusers.”
Williams ultimately fired the woman who threw the shoe, identified only as “Ms. Emily,” along with two other employees who had failed to report the incident.
But Jones is concerned the incident may not have been a one-off, and called for the worker’s arrest on criminal charges of assault and child abuse.
“You need to be in jail like any other child abuser,” she told KTLA. “That’s what I want. Justice.”
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department is investigating the incident.
