Kate and her husband Jeremy thought their youngest daughter Bella was just having a mild case of separation anxiety when they picked her up from her first day at the Ford Island Child Development Center near Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii.
Bella's face was red and patchy, and her tiny voice was raspy from crying through the day. Their usually bubbly 15-month-old, with cheeks and limbs so adorably “chunky,” went on to spend the next two days either hysterically crying or noticeably quiet and withdrawn. She wet herself at night for the first time in a while, her parents said, and she lost her appetite.
On the third day of going to the center in August 2022, she clutched at Kate as she was walked into the facility, crying out, ‘Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, no.”
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In her gut, Kate felt something was wrong, but she'd been told separation anxiety was common. She had decided to go back to work, and she knew it was going to be a tough transition for Bella. Besides, Kate thought to herself, if something had happened at the day care, she or her husband, an intelligence officer in the Army, would have been told.
But the next day, Kate found bruises on Bella's thigh. Later, she would find out that her daughter's cheeks weren't just red and swollen from crying — a day care worker had shoved a photo of Bella's parents into her face so hard that…
