Georgia Mom Accuses Day Care Center Of Abusing Her Toddler
A Georgia mom seeks justice for her toddler in a case of alleged abuse at the hands of daycare workers.
Krystin Collier told PEOPLE that she first enrolled her child at Clarkston First Baptist Academy Daycare last December when he was two years old. It was “a place I trusted to take care of my son,” she explained.
During his first six months at the facility, Collier noticed that her son was having trouble adjusting to the childcare center. The reason became apparent when he allegedly came home on July 6 with signs of physical abuse.
“My son was hysterical and unable to speak. He was missing a shoe, and his face was swollen. I also noticed markings of fingernails that were dug into his skin,” she recalled her 3-year-old son’s condition.
She went to the Clarkston, Ga., daycare to demand answers. They told her that surveillance video showed only “tension” that day between her son and the workers.
When Collier viewed the footage, she saw something totally different. She witnessed “inhumane” treatment of her son in which he was allegedly “slammed on the ground, pulled by his hair, punched in the face and pushed out the door.”
Collier’s lawyer, Jackie Patterson, told the magazine that there’s evidence of a pattern of abuse toward her son.
Patterson stated, “With that tape that we saw, it had to be a pattern. That type of abuse has to be more than a one-time thing, and the child’s behavior had changed for quite sometime before the abuse was discovered.”
Two staff members, Bernetta Glover and Autumn Coney, were charged with first-degree cruelty to children and have bonded out of jail. Clarkston First Baptist Church didn’t respond to PEOPLE’s request for comments.
RELATED: NJ Teen Jashyah Moore Ran Away From Home After Years Of Abuse By Her Mother, Prosecutor Says
State child protective services across the nation received an estimated 4.4 million referrals for alleged mistreatment of approximately 7.9 million children during the fiscal year 2019, according to a report from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. Approximately 2.4 million of those referrals were screened as appropriate for investigation.
