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Conflicting stories emerge after toddler injured at Missouri daycare

ST. CHARLES, Mo. — A mother said she’s still not sure how her 2-year-old daughter sustained a head injury so severe that she was rushed to a St. Louis-area hospital.

Laquileshon Williams said she got a call from her daughter’s daycare in St. Charles on June 13. The caller said she needed to meet them at St. Louis Children’s Hospital.

Williams said that she remembers “trying not to panic,” hoping and praying her daughter was okay.

“She’s my only daughter,” Williams said. “As a mother, it’s my job to make sure she’s protected, and she’s safe.”

The mom said she arrived to see head trauma so severe, that it looked like a third eye. Williams said the nurse pulled her aside to tell her the daycare director’s story was not adding up.

“When they pulled her bandage back, her gash was so deep you could almost see her bone in her head,” said Williams. “I instantly got chills.”

A daycare worker wrote on an accident report that the child “accidentally stepped on her dress” and that “she fell.”

Williams returned to the daycare, Tendercare in St. Charles, the next day. She went to disenroll her daughter and pressed for answers.

She said the daycare then changed its story, reflected in another accident report written by the director. The report is scratched out where it said the child fell. It was amended to say a “bookshelf did fall.”

Williams said she asked to see the bookshelf. She said the daycare center told her it threw the bookshelf away.

“We’ll find out, but if they did throw that bookshelf away, that raises a lot of questions,” said Thomas SanFilippo, Williams’s attorney. “In my line of work, people like to say we get used to that type of thing, but truthfully you never really do. We can’t have kids injured this severely in such a preventable way.”

Tendercare’s attorney Stephen Fleddermann responded about the incident of the bookcase saying that “there was no ‘changing of the story,’ but rather a clarification.”

“When she discovered that the bookcase had fallen over and that the cut may have been caused by the bookcase, as it was falling rather than by the child’s initial contact with the bookcase, she submitted a supplemental report,” said Fleddermann.

Fleddermann also said, “Filing supplemental reports on an injury as facts become known is proper protocol in the industry and, while any injury is, of course, unfortunate, the reporting of this injury and the immediate follow-up care for the student and communication with the mother appears exemplary.”

Williams’s daughter used to attend Florissant’s Tendercare until that location forgot a child outside for nearly five hours. Missouri suspended that location’s childcare license, and Williams transferred her daughter to the St. Charles Tendercare, with the thought it won’t happen again.

She said, “…thinking they’d be safe, and I could trust them, and they let me down and I still don’t know the truth about what happened to my daughter.”

Childcare inspectors with the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, and Office of Childcare Compliance are now investigating. That office will generate a full report soon.