A woman in Florida has been charged with manslaughter after her 6-year-old son killed her newborn daughter after being left alone with her.
62-year-old Kathleen Marie Steele has been charged with aggravated manslaughter of a child after her 13-day old daughter died.
Kathleen reportedly had some errands to run so she took her newborn, her 3-year-old and 6-year-old sons for a drive.
As she went inside a local cell phone repair store, she decided to lock her children in the car with the windows rolled up instead of bringing them in with her. While the mother was in the cell phone store, the baby, also named Kathleen began to cry.
According to the Pinellas County Sherrif’s Office, the 6-year-old brother took the infant out from her car seat after she began crying.
He told investigators that he “slammed her head onto the ceiling, banged her head on the floor and dropped her numerous times.”Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri explains what the boy said.
Police say the kids were left alone in the car for 38 minutes at the cell phone store.
Once Steele returned to the car, police say the boy told her about what he had done, yet she continued on to another errand before returning home. and according to the AP, the van’s ceiling was covered in blood.
“The mistake is with the adult, Kathleen Steele, not a 6-year-old boy,” the sheriff said.
It was only once Steele returned home that she realized there was something wrong with her daughter. Once home from her errands, she realized her daughter was unresponsive so she called a neighbor who also happened to be a registered nurse.
The nurse knew that the infant had died but called 911. The baby was taken to St. Petersburg General Hospital where she was officially pronounced dead.
Steele had apparently appeared on a reality show titled ’55 and Pregnant’ back in 2010 when she and her husband were expecting their first child. The father of the child has since passed away from cancer and she was inseminated with his sperm to conceive her other two children.
This isn’t the first time investigators were called to Steele’s home – when the baby was 3 days old, she fell from a car carrier and suffered a brain bleed.
The sheriff’s office said that they did a thorough investigation and ruled it to be an accident.
“I’m 100% confident there’s nothing else we could’ve done or should’ve done,” Gualtieri said. “We couldn’t have prevented this from happening.”
Steele’s sons have been placed in therapeutic foster care and she is being held on $100,000 bond.