Two children were bitten multiple times on their backs by other kids in unrelated incidents at a pair of Arizona daycare facilities — and their parents are demanding answers.
Rocio Umsted posted to a community Facebook group early this week that her daughter was bitten about eight times on the back — leaving blotchy red marks and even breaking the skin in some places — at the Sunrise Preschool in Maricopa last week.
“I was upset, and I get it, kids are going to be kids, but when I picked [sic] checked my daughter out she had about 8 bite marks all over her back…how can you justify this?” she wrote on Facebook.
The president of the facility, Dana Vela, said in a Facebook post that the toddler “was injured by another child very quickly and while the caregiver was changing a diaper.”
“This is not meant to excuse the incident but to explain what happened,” she wrote. “We can and will do better and this unfortunate matter has provided some hard-learned lessons.”
The child responsible for the biting has been expelled, Vela said.
Meanwhile, another mom, Alice Bryant, posted that her 15-month-old daughter was chomped on at least two dozen times at Creative Beginnings Preschool in Tucson back in February.
“They did not even call when it occurred, or notify me when I picked her up after work,” she wrote. “All of these bites happened in one day.”
“At first, I was like ‘are those really bite marks?’” she told local station Live 5 News. “And then, my brain kinda stopped thinking and I started crying. There’s over 25-plus, it’s hard to tell. Twenty-five would be the minimum that the police officer and I discussed.”
Bryant filed a police report and contacted the state Department of Health Services, but neither department contacted her with updates over the past two months, she wrote in the Facebook post.
The Tuscon Police Department told Live 5 that the bites appear to be from another child. The department’s Child Physical Abuse Unit is on the case, but no arrests or charges have been made.
A woman who answered the phone at the daycare told KOLD 13 News that the mom’s claims are unsubstantiated, and the facility is not prepared to make any statement beyond that.