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Article by Paula Gomes, Tennessee Conservative News –
Three former Memphis Daycare employees were charged last week after an autistic girl died in their care.
The Kid University employees were indicted by a Shelby County grand jury on multiple felony charges on Friday.
Six-year-old Winter Jones, who was unable to speak due to being autistic, was left on a daycare bus last month during a heatwave that saw temperatures in the 90s and heat indexes of more than a 100 degrees.
First to be booked into the Shelby County Jail and held on a $100,000 bond was daycare driver Tametria Norry, 49. Assistant Director Sabrina Powe, daycare assistant Amilya Hardin, and Norry face aggravated child neglect and criminally negligent homicide charges, and also face charges regarding tampering with governmental records.
The three were responsible for taking Winter to Macon Hall Elementary School but she did not exit the bus, a fact that was not discovered at the daycare center until at least six hours had passed. She was found too late, unresponsive and barely breathing. Winter later died at the hospital.
As the result of an investigation conducted by the Tennessee Department of Human Services, Kid University in Cordova was found to be at fault for Winter’s death. Daycare staff were found to not have completed vehicle inspections. They also did not fill out transportation logs with accurate information and failed to do walk-throughs on the van which were required to be completed. Kid University also did not have a monitoring device on the vehicle.
The daycare was cited back in 2019 for transportation violations during an unscheduled inspection for which a corrective plan was required. During the inspection an employee failed to do a walk-through of the bus.
Kid University owner Dr. Raven Marshall-Lewis closed the daycare immediately after Winter’s death but she still owns a number of other daycares in the Memphis area: two Klassy Kids Academy centers, two Ivy League Learning Academies, Imagine Academy, and Yaya’s Place.
According to the Tennessee Department of Human Services, Winter is the second child to die at one of Lewis’s daycare centers.
Sources:
TennesseeConservativeNews.com.
About the Author: Paula Gomes is a Tennessee resident and reporter for The Tennessee Conservative. You can reach Paula at paula@tennesseeconservativenews.com.
