The former director of a Delray Beach daycare center where a young girl died after she was left in a hot van for several hours back in August has been arrested on manslaughter and child cruelty charges for the tot's death.
Petra Rodriguez Perez, former director of Katie's Kids Learning Center, was booked into a Palm Beach County jail Tuesday night, according to a sheriff's office website.
Perez, 45, is the second person to be charged in the Aug. 5 death of 2-year-old Haile Brockington, who was left unattended in the back seat of a van for six hours outside Katie's Kids.
The van's driver, 31-year-old Amanda Inman, was charged with manslaughter in August.
In police interviews with Inman, released this week, Inman called the incident an "honest mistake" and told detectives that Perez hadn't given her proper training in making sure no kids were left on the van.
“I’m not going to really call it training, it was a one-day thing,” Inman said. “Ms. Betsy did it . . . Petra Rodriguez, everything she did was show me nobody sits in that front seat, sometimes I have to lock two of them in one seat belt. When they come in, you check them off, and when you bring them to school, you check them off.
“I don’t go row by row because I never knew that you had to go row by row or whatever."
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Brockington's family has filed a civil suit against Inman and Katie's Kids owners Kathryn Muhammed and Barbara Dilthey. Betty Resch, attorney for the school, told the Palm Beach Post that her clients are vindicated because Perez and Inman "knew what they had to do all along.
“When you read the reports that the health department made and when you look at what was done, which was knowing that you had not seen that child and signed off that you had seen that child, it’s a lie that ended in a death," Resch said.
Resch said Perez had worked at Katie's Kids for two years but had nearly 25 years of child-care experience. Inman had been at Katie's Kids for less than three weeks.
Katie's Kids shut down shortly after the death, and owners Muhammed and Dilthey will appear at a County Health Department hearing to answer to four different health code violations.
“The family is extremely pleased that the investigation continues to show that the problems are systemic and not limited to the driver. We’ve been saying from day one that, unfortunately, Katie’s Kids had a system that was doomed to fail," Brockington family attorney Andrew Yaffa told the Post. "They had no polices and procedures. They had no training. It’s a tragedy that is senseless, and certainly preventable, had they complied with the bare minimums.”
