By Chris Dumond
Two weeks after placing her baby in home-based child care, Lakisha Dickerson got a worrisome phone call.
Something didn’t seem right, the child care provider, Latanya Murphy, told Dickerson, who immediately left work and came to check on her child.
“She was lying there not moving, not crying,” Dickerson recalled in a court hearing Monday.
Murphy, 43, is charged with two counts of child abuse, felonies that carry as much as 10 years in prison.
Lynchburg Juvenile and Domestic Relations Judge William Light on Monday heard testimony from Dickerson and another mother who testified their children came home injured after being in Murphy’s care.
After hearing their testimony and that of the Lynchburg General Hospital forensic nurses who examined the babies, Light ruled there was enough evidence against Murphy to send her case to the September meeting of the city’s grand jury.
Dickerson said Murphy had been providing child care to her baby for about two weeks when she got the call on April 14. After taking the baby to Lynchburg General Hospital, where a CT scan showed the child’s brain was bleeding, they were taken to the University of Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesville.
There, Dickerson testified, doctors found bleeding behind the baby’s eyes as well. Doctors told the mother her baby had either fallen or had been dropped on her head.
The same day Dickerson’s child was taken to the hospital, another mother with twins in Murphy’s care was getting ready to call about bruises all over her daughter’s body.
Murphy called first.
“She told me she couldn’t keep kids no more because there had been another incident,” Contessa Sancho testified.
Sancho’s daughter had been with Murphy for one day when she noticed a bruise above the 10-month-old’s eye. By the weekend, when the baby was staying with her father, Sancho said, the girl was covered in bruises.
Sharon Bondurant, the forensic nurse who examined Sancho’s baby at Lynchburg General Hospital, testified the baby had more than a dozen bruises on her head, stomach, legs, arms and back.
At least one of the bruises, on the girl’s stomach, clearly showed the marks of four fingers, Sancho said.
Lynchburg Police Department Investigator Todd Rodes testified he interviewed Murphy twice.
During the first interview, Rodes said, Murphy told him Dickerson’s baby might have fallen off a couch while in a car carrier.
During the second, she told Rodes she had jerked the carrier off the ground and was swinging it while she brought the child into her bedroom, he said. She also told him she put the carrier down on her bed with some force, he testified.
As for Sancho’s baby, Rodes said Murphy told him she might have hurt her taking her in and out of a walker.
As an in-home child care provider with fewer than six children in her care, she was registered with the Department of Social Services only on a voluntary basis, said Wayne Wolfe, a regional licensing administrator.
In order to be registered, he said, child care providers must undergo a criminal background check and must provide documentation that they do not have a history of Child Protective Services findings.
Cynthia Kirkland, assistant director of the Lynchburg Department of Social Services office, said Child Protective Services complaints are confidential and could not say whether Murphy had a history of such complaints.
Department of Social Services officials in Richmond could not be reached Monday to confirm whether Murphy’s registration has been revoked. She is not listed in the state’s online directory of care providers.
Alliance for Families and Children in Lynchburg, which referred both mothers to Murphy using the state records, listed her entry in the databases of September 2006.
Murphy faces two to 10 years in prison on each charge if she is convicted. The next grand jury is scheduled to meet on Sept. 8.
She is currently free on $5,000 bond.
Sancho said her child has recovered. Dickerson said her baby has had seizures and continues to see doctors at the UVa hospital.
