A teacher at a Queens daycare for autistic toddlers bruised a 3-year-old’s arm and then rubbed hand sanitizer in his mouth — and the school tried to cover it all up, according to a new lawsuit and police records.
Teacher Heidi Velasco Munoz pleaded guilty to endangering the welfare of a child and told police when she was arrested after the 2023 incident that “I don’t have an explanation” for why she put hand sanitizer into the non-verbal child’s mouth.
The lawsuit claims the daycare, Happy Dragon Children Learning Center in Corona, “never reported the abuse” to the parents, and didn’t fire Munoz immediately, despite it being captured on the school’s video surveillance.
“I trusted them,” mom Sabrina Gentile told The Post. “They failed me and my family.”
“Even though this happened in 2023 it still causes pain to all of us,” Gentile said.
“While justice has been done on the criminal side, we now look for justice on the civil side,” said the family’s attorneys, Sanford Rubenstein and Mark Shirian.
After returning home from daycare in March 2023, the boy’s mom was alarmed to see his arm covered in bruises.
“When I took his coat off and saw those bruises on his arms, I automatically called the daycare,” Gentile said.
But the daycare stonewalled her and the boy’s father when they came in the next day, and even issued a false incident report claiming their non-verbal son bit himself, signed by the teacher and the daycare’s director.
“I’m able to tell the difference between a bite mark and a bruise,” Gentille said, who’s spent over a decade working as an EMS first-responder. “It looked like fingerprints.”
Rubenstein added, “That was obviously an attempt at a cover-up. Obviously, in this case, the cover-up failed.”
The daycare even refused to share surveillance footage depicting the disturbing incident for hours when father German Vasquez returned the next day, so he called the police.
“The school didn’t want to show us nothing until the police actually arrived on the scene,” Vasquez told The Post.
Police reports describe the video as showing Munoz “aggressively pinning” the crying, non-verbal child between her legs, removing a toy from his mouth, “intentionally flicking” his arm and “forcibly inserting an unknown substance into [his] mouth.”
“I was in shock,” Vasquez said. “I was seeing the lady rubbing stuff in my son’s mouth.”
“They were not protecting my son,” he added.
Gentile rushed her boy to the hospital, thinking his teacher had been forcibly medicating him. Toxicology tests came up negative.
Munoz readily admitted to police after her arrest a month later that she’d stuck hand sanitizer in the boy’s mouth, police reports state.
“It was not appropriate to restrain him that way,” she said, according to police records of body camera footage, “and I felt bad when I did it.”
When an officer asked her about putting hand sanitizer in the boy’s mouth, she replied: “Yes. I don’t have an explanation for that.”
“Despite the egregious nature of Munoz’s conduct, Happy Dragon failed to immediately terminate Munoz and failed to implement any safeguards to prevent further abuse,” the suit states.
An administrator at Happy Dragon said that they were not aware of the incident, and The Post was unable to contact Munoz.
A spokesperson from the Queens District Attorney said they didn’t have any information about Munoz or her case, but according to records obtained through FOIL, Munoz pleaded guilty to endangering the welfare of a child in November 2023 and was sentenced to 15 days of community service.
Nearly two years later, the boy is doing better and loves his new school. But his mom and dad can tell he gets nervous if they drive toward his old daycare.
“I think my son remembers clearly,” Vasquez said, “because as I’m driving over the highway, he gets uncomfortable, he starts to make noise.”
“To this day, I don’t really drive that direction,” Gentile said.
Read the full article here