Who's Minding the Children?
As day-care violations endanger LI's youngsters, state's watchdog has repeatedly failed to act
By Brian Donovan, Investigations Team
Originally published in Newsday, 1999
DAY ONE
On the last day of Alexa Laureano's short life, her mom dropped her off at what she thought was a safe and friendly day-care home.
Alexa was 143 days old that spring morning as she rode in her car seat on the way to Kelly Simmons' house, and already Christine and Edward Laureano had filled two albums with photos.
They were new parents, and they wanted every memory: Alexa being born, Alexa on Christmas, Alexa with the dog, Alexa snuggling on dad's chest, Alexa reaching out toward mommy's face.
They had been nervous about day care. They asked friends for recommendations, visited Simmons' house in Hampton Bays, liked the atmosphere. The home seemed orderly and Simmons was cheerful, they said.
Christine Laureano said she asked Simmons that morning to keep a close eye on Alexa, who seemed to be catching a cold. "I said, ‘Just watch her.' She was in her car carrier, sleeping in it. I said, ‘Just leave her wherever you're going to be."'
A few hours later on May 5, 1995, Alexa was dead—the victim of what a state day-care inspector's report called "lack of supervision and neglect."
For the Laureanos, what began as a routine workday became a nightmarish blur of police, doctors, medical jargon, inexpressible grief, guilt, and the image of their daughter's small corpse on a sheet-metal gurney in the emergency room.
Something about the contrast between Alexa's soft innocence and the bleak, industrial look of the gurney has locked that memory into their minds. Sometimes it still wakes them late at night, they say, stirring their anger about how little her dying seemed to matter to the system that was supposed to protect her.
Alexa Laureano's death offers a window into how New York State's feeble oversight has allowed little children to be harmed in day-care facilities run by providers who aren't adequately screened, trained or watched over.
The state agency charged with those responsibilities has repeatedly failed to take effective action against Long Island providers whose violations of regulations have hurt or endangered day-care children, a Newsday investigation has found. The problems in such cases range from dirty conditions, poor food and overcrowding to children being injured, sexually molested or dying.
With a small staff and a fast-growing work load, the agency, called the Bureau of Early Childhood Services (BECS), often does only superficial investigations, and those who break the rules usually aren't punished, Newsday found.
The pattern of weak enforcement combines with gaps in state laws and regulations to produce a system so lax that officials routinely grant approval for day care at homes listed in public records as the addresses of violent criminals and drug dealers.
And behind every young victim of the state's more conspicuous failures, such as Alexa, are thousands of others who could have grown more, both mentally and emotionally, if the quality of their day care had gotten closer scrutiny.
The case of Kelly Simmons illustrates how the state first failed to spot a problem, then failed to fix it.
When Alexa died, Simmons had been operating illegally, without the required state license and without the state's knowledge, for more than five years, according to records. Already, a boy only 4 months old had died of sudden infant death syndrome in her care. Both babies had been left alone for substantial periods, records say, although regulations require direct supervision.
This, according to records, is how Alexa died:
About 8:30 a.m. Simmons placed Alexa, asleep and strapped into her car seat, onto a water bed in a back bedroom. Her assistant told police that she'd previously cautioned Simmons that the floor was a more stable surface, but that Simmons preferred to use the bed.
Then Simmons went out for part of the morning, leaving the assistant alone to care for about 10 other children in the house. In the last three hours of her life, Alexa was checked only once.
Somehow the car seat overturned, forcing Alexa's face down into a comforter. Apparently, unsupervised children jumped on the water bed or turned over her seat in some other way, investigators said.
Alexa couldn't struggle forcefully enough to get her face out of the comforter. She smothered to death while other kids played video games across the hall.
BECS concluded that Simmons' poor supervision and disregard for safety were factors in Alexa's death. The state could have imposed a heavy fine—up to $250 for every day of illegal operation—and sought a court order shutting her down.
But those things weren't done. Instead, BECS merely handed her a letter telling her to put herself out of business.
Investigators suspected Simmons would resume doing child care as soon as the state stopped paying attention, records show. And in 1997, Southampton Town police sent the state a letter saying, "Ms. Simmons is currently providing day care services, accepting new clients and assuring her customers that she is licensed."
The state dismissed the matter as "unsubstantiated," however, after an inspector saw no children on one short visit to the house.
Newsday both this year and last has watched adults dropping off children at Simmons' house in the morning and picking up children there in the afternoon and evening. Simmons refused to comment on the deaths but denied she was breaking any state regulations.
She noted that state law allows anyone to care for up to two outside children without any state approval or oversight. "So I don't consider myself doing day care," she said. "And I really don't, how do I say, care what people say … I'm abiding by the rules."
Simmons' lawyer, Timothy Mazzei, said of Alexa's death, "It was a horrible thing that the young child died in the custody of my client. She never wanted anything like that to happen. She cared very much for the children she was caring for and it was a tragedy for everybody involved.”
Det. Sgt. Robert Flood of the Southampton police, who headed the investigation into Alexa's death, said in an interview he didn't understand why the state didn't take stronger action.
"When you're dealing with little kids who can't defend themselves," Flood said, "there should be more teeth in the system."
For more than a year, the Newsday investigations team has examined how the state bureau has handled thousands of alleged violations of day-care regulations on Long Island. Asked about cases in which little was done about providers who harmed children or had a pattern of violations, the agency's top officials acknowledged that state enforcement had been poor for years, but they said that since the mid-1990s, they have been working hard to strengthen it.
Suzanne Zafonte Sennett, director of the bureau, said in a letter to Newsday that some of the older cases reflected "outdated policies and practices that we have been working hard to strengthen and correct," and that others "have highlighted the limitations placed on this Office by current law and resources."
She said that "we acknowledge that there is clear room for further improvements in the area of child care monitoring and inspections. However, we also point proudly to the work already accomplished and that which is underway."
Newsday's examination, involving hundreds of interviews and thousands of pages of state, county, court and police records, found a pattern of problems spanning the 1990s and continuing to the present:
Weak state enforcement has repeatedly allowed children to remain in dangerous, abusive or badly run day-care facilities—sometimes long after state inspectors discovered the problems. On Long Island, more government employees oversee bingo games than check on the safety and quality of day care. Inspectors' caseloads on Long Island have grown steadily, office paperwork consumes much of their time, and investigations often are cursory. Despite hundreds of substantiated violations, from child abuse to faulty paperwork, BECS has never fined any Long Island day-care provider for anything. Only two part-time lawyers are assigned to do the legal work and hearings for all enforcement proceedings for the state outside of New York City. Some cases have dragged on for several years while violations continued. For more than 20 years, a Miller Place day-care center got dozens of citations for unsafe, dirty, "chaotic" conditions and poor supervision. One winter night in 1992, staff members overlooked a sleeping 2-year-old when they left, and the toddler, cold and soaked with urine, had to be rescued by police. But the owner never was fined or forced to close.
The state allows day care to take place in homes where criminals live. A Newsday computer analysis found 178 people in the state with convictions for crimes, or violations such as harassment and disorderly conduct, who gave their addresses in court documents as homes that New York State has approved for day care. Seventy-six were on Long Island, and 43 of those originally had been arrested for alleged violence or drug activity. More than 30 of the cases elsewhere in the state also involved drugs or violence. Some offenders are the providers themselves; others are family members. They include people who've committed sex offenses, hurt victims with knives and guns, sold crack and heroin, beaten women, and served prison time. Public records show what crimes they've committed and which day-care homes they give as their addresses. But unlike 42 other states, New York State does no independent checking into whether day-care applicants have criminal records. Instead, the state relies on voluntary disclosures by providers and fails even to ask for voluntary disclosures by others living in day-care homes. One provider in South Setauket was approved despite a criminal record that included killing a young man in a DWI crash. She got drunk repeatedly with day-care children in her house and at least four kids were hurt, records say.
Illegal facilities with bad records have operated on Long Island for years with state officials' knowledge. One Amityville center was charged with scores of violations while operating unlicensed for more than five years, defying the state's efforts to make improvements, while its former owner pleaded with state officials to close the place as "unhealthy, dangerous and destructive to the welfare of the children." The oversight of an unlicensed Southold center was so sloppy that the state never realized the man in charge was an ex-convict once charged with sodomizing a baby.
Overcrowded centers, with too many kids and too few adults, have been cited for violations in which children died, were molested, suffered injuries or were subjected to yelling and harsh discipline, records show. Some providers have been found to hide children from inspectors in closed rooms, basements and nearby houses. Some collect public funds from county government for more children than their state licenses allow. And New York State allows providers to care for substantially larger groups of children than the standards recommended by the nation's pediatricians. But even places with repeated overcrowding citations generally have been let off merely with warnings to reform. When a baby suffered a seizure at one Commack day-care center with a record of repeated overcrowding complaints, the facility was so understaffed that a 10-year-old was put in charge of infants while the adults dealt with the crisis.
Government agencies put kids in danger by not exchanging information important to their safety. Some day-care homes have been the sites of repeated violent family disputes. But state day-care officials don't find out because their agency doesn't tell police which homes are licensed for day care. For 15 months the state didn't know that police had dealt with 23 complaints of domestic disturbances and other turmoil at a Shirley day-care home, run by a provider with an abusive boyfriend. The state found out only after a child complained at school about violence in the house. BECS also doesn't give information on the locations of day-care homes to fire departments, where officials say they should know if a burning house could legally contain as many as 28 children. Agencies' failures to share information allowed state-approved day care to take place at a Central Islip house that also operated as a "sober house" for drug and alcohol abusers.
Providers in New York State can go into business with no training and are later required to complete only a fraction of the training hours required of hairdressers, manicurists and hot-wax appliers. Or they can completely avoid training by simply checking the wrong block on a state form. Some Long Island centers with numerous violations have been ordered to undergo extra training, refused to cooperate, and still kept their licenses. The state's oversight of required training is disorganized and depends heavily on an honor system some officials say is easily abused. The state pays for training but keeps no central records of who gets trained in what skills. Even providers who comply with all state rules get only half the training hours recommended by doctors and public health officials. They don't have to pass any tests, and blank certificates sometimes are passed out at training sessions. When teachers failed to prevent one 2-year-old from repeatedly biting another's face at an East End center, state regulators had no way of checking whether anyone on staff had ever been trained in the problem of biting by toddlers.
Falling Short
Statistically speaking, not many children die while in day care in New York State. Statewide figures released to Newsday identify 42 children—seven on Long Island—who have died in day care since 1991. In homes and day-care centers, the state has more than 25,000 licensed and registered day-care programs. Twenty-three of the deaths statewide (five on Long Island) were attributed to SIDS, the unexplained death of babies from natural causes.
The day-care field attracts many loving and competent people. Many of them work long days for low pay and take training courses at night. Almost all of the kids come home physically unharmed, and many day-care centers and providers who care for children in their homes work hard to improve their programs and correct problems.
But every trade has a small percentage of people who don't do their jobs well, who need to be watched closely, disciplined and sometimes fired. There are providers who are impatient, disorganized or lazy, who cut corners and ignore rules they think won't be enforced. And the stress of child care sometimes causes good people to make mistakes that harm children.
It's cases of that kind, children's advocates say, that cast the most unfavorable light on New York State's trade-offs between quantity and quality in day care, and on the two sometimes-conflicting missions of the Bureau of Early Childhood Services.
During the explosive growth of day care in the 1990s, the work load of BECS inspectors has risen sharply, particularly on Long Island, at the same time that their agency has been given a dual mission, that of both cop and coach.
In New York State and elsewhere, much day care remains unregulated by government. A major priority for BECS has been to facilitate the rapid growth of the state-regulated portion of the day-care industry. Bringing thousands of formerly illegal providers into a regulated system is a major undertaking in a state where as many as a million children are in day care but only about 473,000 slots exist in regulated facilities.
Across the country, federal and state programs to get large numbers of people off of welfare rolls have increased the pressure on day-care regulators to help the industry grow as quickly as possible.
As long as children's safety isn't sacrificed, BECS officials say, they'd rather use training and moderate pressure to get providers to improve, rather than harsh enforcement crackdowns that might only cause marginal providers to go back to operating illegally.
Inspectors in the regional offices spend a lot of their time processing the paperwork of new applicants and are encouraged by supervisors to "work with" providers rather than taking a hawkish approach to enforcement, people in the system say.
And even when New York State's regulatory system is working according to its own rules, some day-care kids will grow old enough for public school without ever seeing a state inspector. The inspection goal for so-called "family day-care" homes, where a single provider can legally care for three to eight children, is only 20 percent a year. About 23 percent of the kids in regulated day care in New York State are in such homes.
State officials say that quality remains the top priority. "Gov. George E. Pataki recognizes the need to support good quality child care, because good child care gives parents peace of mind while they are working," John Johnson, commissioner of the state Office of Children and Family Services, which includes BECS, said last spring when he kicked off a statewide campaign to help families select care.
But critics say New York now lets virtually anyone who wants to take care of children. "They may indeed be increasing slots," said Fran Karliner, corporate and information services coordinator at the Child Care Council of Nassau, " we will have less quality. We will have quantity, but we won't have quality."
Every year Working Mother magazine assembles a panel of nationally recognized child-care advocates to study the state of child care in America. And every year those experts have not been impressed by New York. In the latest review, the panel said child care in New York is "average"—compared with "above average" and "poor"—in its four key areas: quality, safety, availability and commitment by government. A major reason for the low score was that New York does not require caregivers to have any training at all when they start work at a day-care center or home.
"… New York still needs to improve its own standards for training," the study's editors wrote.
In the seven years that the magazine has been rating states, New York has never made the Top 10 list. The best states for child care are California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin, the magazine's experts say.
Private organizations also are critical of New York's way of regulating day care. "My perception is that New York seems to have good regulations but that not a great deal of money is spent on enforcement," said Lynn White, spokeswoman for the National Child Care Association, a group of licensed private day-care centers. "And there's a trade-off here. We believe enforcement is as critical as regulation."
Children's advocates such as Elie Ward of Statewide Youth Advocacy say more must be done. "We can do a whole lot better," she said. "I certainly think this administration has been very lax on the registration and licensing quality issue."
BECS officials acknowledged in interviews that enforcement was poor in the early and mid-1990s and that problems have been allowed to exist for too long. But they say enforcement has started to improve and will continue to get stronger. They said a computerized record-keeping system, to be ready soon, will strengthen enforcement.
Suzanne Sennett, director of BECS, said the use of serious enforcement measures such as license revocations and suspensions has increased from three instances on Long Island in 1995 to 35 in 1998. "Our track record in enforcement for the really serious cases has gotten so much better," she said. The agency, she said, is "continuing to strengthen our ability to enforce the basic rules … ” "We're trying to speed up the development of all of those systems and all that capacity, but we started from a relatively shallow capacity to one that is taking some time to burst to full bloom, what we want it to be. I think that the numbers show that we're going in the right direction."
Dying Alone
For Debbi and Richard Joslin of Hampton Bays, talk of stronger enforcement in the future doesn't offer much consolation. The Joslins teach in an elementary school. One October afternoon in 1992, Richard unexpectedly appeared at the door of Debbi's classroom. He was pale, his voice shaky.
They had to go to the emergency room, he said—their first-born baby, Thomas, had been rushed there from the home of their day-care provider, Kelly Simmons.
Thomas Joslin, 146 days old, was dead. Exactly when he died would never be determined. Although state regulations say children "must not be left without competent direct supervision at any time," police records show that Thomas, like Alexa Laureano, was left alone without being checked for as long as two hours in the unlicensed day-care house.
Simmons told police she put Thomas in a bedroom about 9:30 a.m., checked him at 11:30 a.m. and again at 12:45 p.m. About 1:30 p.m., Simmons said, she found him not breathing, his face blue. His death was diagnosed as SIDS, sudden infant death syndrome from unexplained natural causes.
That night Debbi Joslin went into Thomas' room and wept near the empty crib, holding one of his stuffed toys. It was a school bus, like the one he would never be riding.
Simmons was taking care of about six day-care children by herself when the Joslins began leaving Thomas with her, a month before he died, they said. Like the Laureanos, they chose her because people they knew recommended her, they said.
Thomas was lying on his stomach when found dead, police records say. Six months earlier, the American Academy of Pediatrics had announced at a nationally publicized news conference that healthy infants should be put to sleep on their backs or sides to decrease their risk of sudden infant death syndrome.
The Child Care Council of Suffolk, when training new providers who are seeking state licenses, tells them that children must be under constant supervision. "Someone must be with them always, even when they're napping," instructor Carol Slippen told a group. "That's not a time for you to go upstairs and do something else."
SIDS remains a mysterious phenomenon, and there is no certainty that better supervision or sleeping on his back would have saved Thomas. But the possibility still troubles his parents.
The Joslins live only a few hundred yards from Simmons, but they have not spoken since shortly after Thomas' death. In their last conversation, Debbi Joslin said she asked Simmons about checking on Thomas. "I said, ‘How did you check? Did you touch him?' She said no … You never leave a baby sleeping that long—you never, ever … I really do blame her."
State and police records examined by Newsday contain no indication that BECS ever learned of Thomas Joslin's death at the time. Even now, seven years after Thomas died, there are no official procedures for police departments and state day-care regulators to exchange information on children who are harmed while under care outside of their homes, even if a death occurs.
A Crowded House, a Baby's Death
On May 5, 1995, when the Southampton Town Police Department responded to Alexa Laureano's death at Simmons' house, Det. Sgt. Flood, commander of the detective division, said he remembered the address immediately as the same place where Thomas Joslin had died.
Police officers went to Christine and Edward Laureano's jobs to tell them Alexa was at Southampton Hospital. Edward, a pool contractor, was out on a job, and he met the officer at a deli. "He said, ‘Your daughter Alexa had an accident.' I just fell to my knees, and I was completely out for a couple of seconds."
Christine, part-owner of another deli at the time, was working in the kitchen when an officer walked in. "I called the hospital and they said you can take your time, there's been an accident, and they wouldn't tell me, so one of the girls from the deli drove me. The only thing I was thinking was, ‘Oh my God, don't let her die, don't let her die,' the whole way to the hospital, the longest trip of my life."
Flood stood with them as they identified Alexa on the gurney, tubes from failed medical procedures still sticking out of her body. A veteran of such scenes, Flood wondered which way this one would go. He had seen marriages begin to fall apart at exactly this moment, as each spouse began thinking about blame.
With the Laureanos, he said, the shock of seeing Alexa seemed to draw them together instantly. "They were united from the get-go," Flood said. They hugged each other and their clergyman, Msgr. Edmond Trench, who was saying things about heaven that sounded, even to him, he said later, somewhat abstract; inadequate.
Flood liked the Laureanos; he admired the way they handled themselves. He didn't know the laws and regulations governing day care, but he said he resolved to take this case as far as he could. "Certainly the bells and whistles went off because of the prior investigation" of Thomas Joslin's death, he said.
Simmons told one of Flood's detectives that she had been operating her day-care program for about 51/2 years. When Flood found out she still had no state license, he said, he decided that "there should be some sort of criminal charges if you fail to register a day-care center."
Soon Flood learned that an important fact had been withheld initially from detectives. At first, records show, Simmons' assistant, Dorothy Marino, told police that Alexa's car seat had been upright on the water bed when she found Alexa dead.
Four days later, a lawyer representing Marino called Flood. He said his client wanted to come in and "relay additional information." This time, Marino told police she "went into the bedroom and found the car seat was completely overturned and that all she could see was part of Alexa's left leg and foot," Flood's report said. Marino would not talk to Newsday.
"She went to lift the car seat off the baby and discovered that Alexa was strapped into the seat … it appeared to her the car seat rolled over … there were children playing Nintendo games in a room across the hallway, those children were 3 to 4 years old."
Marino added, according to the police report, "that she and Kelly Simmons had a previous discussion of the fact that Ms. Simmons preferred to place the car seat on the bed while would place the car seat on the floor, a surface she thought to be more stable."
While Simmons was away from the house for part of the morning, Marino was alone with about 10 children, records say. Marino later told a state day-care inspector that she "feels one of the children may have gone into the room and jumped on the bed or overturned the car seat. She does not feel the baby could have done that on her own. Since there was a lack of supervision, this could have happened."
Flood said his department and the Suffolk medical examiner's office conducted tests on Simmons' water bed with the same car seat and a doll of Alexa's weight, assessing how much force had to be used to overturn it. They concluded that the movements of a 4-month-old baby could not have tipped over the seat.
The only hypothesis that fit the facts, Flood said, was that "somebody would have had to have gotten into that room and disturbed it in some way. There were a lot of other kids in that house."
Alexa had been left on the water bed about 8:30 a.m. and was found dead about 11:20 to 11:30 a.m., according to records. Simmons told police she checked on Alexa only once, about 9:45 a.m. Marino said she made no checks.
Flood reported the death to the state day-care agency. A BECS licensing representative, after investigating the incident, wrote that the circumstances indicated the death was "perhaps unintentionally caused by one of the children, resulting from lack of supervision."
His report concluded that violations of two regulations were a factor in the death: supervision ("Child was left unattended without direct supervision for a prolonged time") and safety ("Leaving child strapped in car seat on water bed created unsafe condition"). Suffolk's Child Protective Services reached a similar conclusion, according to state records.
Simmons said in an interview that she did not want to talk about the deaths. "It's the past … and I'd rather not bring it all up again," she said.
A Frustrating Outcome
Over the next several months, the state regulatory system for day care, the criminal justice system and the civil court system all got involved in the issues surrounding Alexa's death. But in the end, despite the findings of lax supervision and broken rules, the workings of all of those systems produced little more than frustration for the Laureanos and Flood.
The state told Simmons to stop doing day care and refused to grant her a license when she applied. But as with dozens of other Long Island cases examined by Newsday in which rules were broken, the state agency imposed no fine and did not ask for a court order to keep her out of business.
John Ray, a lawyer for the Laureanos, said he tried to persuade the Suffolk district attorney's office to charge Simmons with criminally negligent homicide or reckless endangerment. "We tried our damnedest to get the district attorney to prosecute," Ray said. "We were just hitting stone walls about it. We could never understand it."
The Laureanos said one prosecutor told them the reason was that they didn't believe they could prove criminal intent. "You don't necessarily prove intent with criminally negligent homicide—that's why the word negligent is in there," Ray said.
The Suffolk district attorney's office said in a statement that it "concluded that neither the investigation, the available facts, or the law supported a prosecution for criminally negligent homicide.”
In one of the nation's first criminal prosecutions based on day-care violations, a Maryland provider was charged with involuntary manslaughter because she failed to check on two napping babies who suffocated when a quilt fell across their faces. She accepted a plea agreement to reckless endangerment in March and is serving a 28-month prison sentence.
Flood said he asked the state attorney general's office if it would bring a case against an unlicensed day-care provider. But officials told him such violations were handled administratively by BECS, he said.
The report by the BECS investigator raised doubts about whether Simmons would go out of business voluntarily. Before attempting an unannounced inspection five weeks after Alexa's death, he wrote, "I called her as a potential customer to see if she was still operating. She told me that she was still available to provide day care … "
When he arrived and identified himself, he wrote, she refused to let him in. He said he saw several children in and around the house. "The fact that not one but two children died in her home would be extremely upsetting and devastating to most people, but I found her peculiarly devoid of much sentiment or remorse," he wrote.
"I believe that she was still watching children after this death, as she expressed some opposition to the idea of stopping care immediately … She expressed a moderately contemptful attitude for licensing … " Records show that the agency's Long Island office referred the case to the Albany office for enforcement action, but that the only action taken was a letter telling Simmons to stop doing day care.
Sennett, in a recent statement, acknowledged that a fine might have been appropriate. She said such a case now, under a recently passed law, could be handled criminally, which she thought was a better option.
At the time, Flood drew up court papers, with help from lawyers from the Suffolk district attorney and state attorney general, charging Simmons in Southampton Justice Court with violating the state law requiring day-care facilities to be licensed. But state law at the time, while requiring licensing, did not provide criminal penalties for those who don't comply. Eventually, Simmons pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct, and records of the case were sealed. The sentence could not be learned.
The Laureanos filed a civil suit against Simmons but had to settle for only "a few thousand dollars," Ray said, because Simmons had no liability insurance covering the day-care children. In New York State, even licensed home day-care providers are not required to have such insurance.
In March, 1997, about 22 months after Alexa's death, Flood wrote to the BECS Long Island office that Simmons was again doing day care. "I would hope that your office would re-open the investigation … to see if she is operating without the necessary license." Debbi Joslin told Newsday that one of her colleagues has been using Simmons as a day-care provider for years.
As with other cases examined by Newsday, the BECS inquiry was brief and superficial. Records say a state inspector visited the house, saw no children, was told by a family member that Simmons was not doing day care, and closed the case as "unsubstantiated" without further investigation.
The Laureanos said they were amazed and angered that the state regulatory agency did so little after two children died in the same illegal day-care house. They said no one from the agency even spoke to them.
Christine Laureano said: "I'd like to see some kind of law protecting the children and stating that if you neglect them for any reason, you're done, you get put in jail, no negotiating. There's just too much going on that people are not being held accountable for, and that the public doesn't know about."
"Justice was not done," Edward Laureano said. "She's proven herself to be unable to watch kids, and she got a slap on the wrist."
The passing of time and the births of more children have brightened the lives of the Joslins and the Laureanos since their first-born babies died. The Laureanos have two young children now; the Joslins have three. Their houses are full of toys and clamor.
But they say that feelings of grief, guilt and bitterness still flare up, along with intense fears about the safety of their new children. When their daughter Tarrin was born in 1993, the Joslins hired a nurse to sit in her room all night and watch her as she slept. For two of their babies, they used strap-on breathing and heartbeat monitors every night when they put them to sleep.
Even now, seven years after Thomas' death, Richard Joslin said irrational fears about his children's safety still come often. "You're always on edge, it's always in the back of your mind, you're always, ‘Where are they, what are they doing?' and you fear the worst."
The Laureanos say any sound from their sleeping children tends to jolt them awake at night and fill their minds with the image of Alexa's small body on the metal gurney.
"When you're lying in bed in the dark, that's what you're seeing," Christine Laureano said. "That's why we don't laugh much anymore. That's why I find it hard to find joy in things anymore."
There is, ultimately, no full recovery from the death of a child, the two couples say, no matter how grateful they are for their other kids.
Among the troubling thoughts, they said, are that Simmons went back to doing day care, that the enforcement system seemed so ineffectual, that the deaths of their babies seemed not to change anything.
"Why isn't more being done to protect children?" Edward Laureano asked.
