On 13 September, the father of little Maya (the name has been changed), 7 months old, comes like every evening to pick up his daughter at nursery. Coming home to bathe him, discovers several red marks on her baby’s chest. Worried, he takes pictures and calls his wife who is still at work. “I wasn’t more upset than that,” Loubna, mother of little Maya, tells us. I thought to myself that when she started crawling, it was just tiny traces of friction.”
But the father, Imed, is not convinced. Already when he had come to pick up his baby from kindergarten, he had found the stick strange. “He was greeted by two employees who anomalously insisted that Maya had a toothache, that she hadn’t eaten her snack well, continues her mother. My husband also remembered that our daughter was already ready, fully dressed when he arrived, which usually doesn’t happen.”
But when Loubna changes her daughter the next day when she wakes up, she finds to her horror that the red tracks have turned into bruises. “There was also one on the back of the right cheek.” Her mother rushes to the emergency room. The father immediately contacts the nest. An explanation is in order. First, he asks the director of the Microstars private institute in Livry-Gargan (Seine-Saint-Denis). “She went to talk to the employees who had been caring for our son that day. Then she contacted us again to tell us that nothing had happened. Worse, he offered us a place in another kindergarten,” Loubna continues. Her parents insist. But for the nativity scene, nothing happened within its walls.
Complaint against X
On 15 September, the father filed a complaint against X at the Livry-Gargan police station for “violence of a child under 15”. A few days later the injuries were reported to a doctor from the Forensic Medicine Unit, who recognized Maya for two days of total incapacity for work (ITT). On her place, the doctor who examines her and observes the bruises asks her parents if Maya vomited or lost consciousness after her fall. “I couldn’t tell him,” Loubna continues, sobbing into her voice. And since the daycare denies everything, I may never know if my daughter is sick. It’s awful not knowing.”
Contacted by telephone, the director of the nursery did not want to speak. She just admitted to our questions “that she didn’t say nothing happened”. The Microstars office coordinator, who we tried to contact on several occasions, did not return our calls.
Following the presentation of a complaint, an investigation was opened at the Bobigny public prosecutor’s office. But for Maya’s parents’ lawyer, Me Philippe-Henry Honegger, “this serious event has not been taken seriously enough, neither by the kindergarten nor by the police,” he explains. “When we have a child with traces like these, with two days of ITT, and we have people identified in the nursery, we can ask our police to start the investigation on the same day. Someone should go interview the asylum staff. Given the seriousness of the facts, even a week later, it is already too late ”.
