A week ago today, 2-year-old Jazmin Green bounded out of bed at 6:45 a.m., brimming with excitement in anticipation of a field trip to Chuck E. Cheese’s.
“She was laughing, fighting with her brother, wanting to be picked up,” Jazmin’s mom, April McAlister, recalled of her daughter’s last day alive.
McAlister buckled the toddler and her brother, Savion, 4, into their car seats for the short ride to the day care center where both kids had learned their ABCs and much more. At 2, Jazmin was already counting up to 20 and learning songs. Her favorite was “I love you, you love me.”
Initially skeptical about day care in general, McAlister and the kids’ father, Charles Green, had decided it would give their children a head start on their educations. And it did.
“I had good results there as far as education and people skills and growth of the children,” Green said.
Over the years, they had come to trust the staff at Marlo’s Magnificent Early Learning Center. Owner and operator Marlo Fallings greeted them each morning, often saying, “Bless you.”
At 7:30 a.m. that Monday, McAlister kissed her children good-bye and returned home to begin her job as an at-home technical support worker for Care Stream Dental. It was a normal day in a normal work week.
At 3:30 p.m., however, McAlister’s day — the family’s life — would say goodbye to normal.
That’s when she got the call from the day care center telling her to come quickly. It’s an emergency, the girl on the phone said. McAlister hung up, heart racing. Before she could collect her thoughts and car keys, she got another call from the school telling her to go instead to Southern Regional Hospital. When she arrived at the hospital, she saw a police officer standing behind the center’s gold Chevy Astro van.
Savion or Jazmin is injured. A bad cut. A broken arm, she thought as she hurried inside.
Instead, a nurse told her Jazmin had gone into cardiac arrest.
“I went crazy,” the Jonesboro mother said. “What could have happened for her to go into cardiac arrest? My daughter has a physical every year, and every year she’s fine. I went crazy.”
Hospital staff tried to soothe her. They ushered her into a private room. At 4:46 p.m., a doctor came in and told her Jazmin had died.
The “happy-go-lucky baby” with the big eyes, the big smile, the hearty appetite and a passion for Dora The Explorer dolls and the color pink, the little girl with the stubborn streak who seesawed between wanting to be picked up and insisting, “let me dress myself,” was gone.
Time of death: 4:43 p.m.
“I lost my mind, screaming, hollering, yelling,” the 38-year-old mother said. “I just didn’t know what to do. I just was crazy that they did this.”
She composed herself long enough to call Green, a forklift operator who had already been alerted that something was wrong and was racing from his job in College Park to the hospital. Jazmin’s gone, she told him.
When Green arrived, the couple viewed their daughter’s body.
“She looked like she was sleeping,” McAlister said. The couple called Evette Jackson, a relative, to pick up their son. He was still at the day care center, in the care of the people whose actions in his sister’s death are now questioned.
A week later, the family is still coming to grips with their loss. On Saturday, they buried Jazmin in a pink and white dress.
“It’s been real hard. Lot of late nights, staying up. Getting no sleep. Hard to eat,” said McAlister.
Now, they’re struggling to piece together what happened, sifting through the various accounts they’ve been given.
Some things are not in dispute.
At 2 p.m. the gold van carrying eight children, including Savion and Jazmin, pulled up to Marlo’s after the trip to Chuck E. Cheese’s. The driver and lead teacher was Quantabia Hopkins, Fallings’ daughter, 23. Assisting her was a cousin, 16, who also worked at the center.
Hopkins and her cousin collected seven of the children and took them inside for their naps.
At one point, McAlister said she was told that Jazmin was overlooked because she had slipped between the seats. But later it emerged in court documents that Jazmin was found still belted into her car seat in the rear seat of the van.
In compliance with state regulations, Hopkins gave Fallings a signed or initialed checklist stating that all eight children had been removed from the van.
As Savion and other kids slept in the air-conditioned center, Jazmin sat strapped into the van. The entrance to the in-home day care was just a few steps away. So, too, were rows and rows of Clayton County police cars. The police precinct was just yards away.
Outside, temperatures were in the mid-90s. Within a half hour, the temperature inside the van would have been as much as 34 degrees higher, and Jazmin’s body temperature would have soared past 104, the point at which heat stroke occurs, to 107, the temperature considered lethal.
At this point, the timeline gets fuzzy. Early reports said Jazmin remained in the van for close to two hours. But court records say Jazmin was discovered unconscious in the van as early as 2:35 p.m., more than an hour before the 911 call.
That call came at 3:44 p.m. An emergency crew from Fire Station 6, less than a mile from the day care center, was dispatched within two to three minutes. Clayton police arrived shortly after that, having raced on foot from the nearby police station.
Police took Hopkins and Fallings in for questioning. According to court records, they admitted that the checklist saying all kids had been removed from the van was bogus. It had been filled out before the van reached the center.
They were arrested early Tuesday morning along with the 16-year-old and charged with reckless conduct, cruelty to children and involuntary manslaughter. The van was impounded.
The adults are out on bond, and the 16-year-old has been released to her parents.
“She was very distraught, very upset,” A. Colin Slay, chief of staff for the Clayton County Juvenile Court, said of the girl, who attends high school in Clayton County and has no prior legal problems.
McAlister said she was not aware that a 16-year-old was in any way responsible for watching over her children.
“They are not responsible enough to watch kids,” she said. “They’re too interested in boyfriends and girlfriends. I didn’t know a 16-year-old was in there. I would have raised concerns.”
Jazmin’s parents are also disturbed by reports that a March inspection report cited violations at the day care center, violations that foreshadowed the errors that led to their daughter’s death. They wonder what state inspectors did to make sure the problem was corrected.
“It should have been addressed,” Charles Green said. “There was definitely something wrong that day.”
“The story doesn’t make sense,” said McAlister.
As of Friday afternoon, police had not called the family to resolve any of their questions.
Savion doesn’t fully understand what has happened to his sister.
“He’s going to grow with this,” his father Charles Green said. “This was his best friend.”
Although Marlo’s has not operated since the incident, it has not been officially closed. By law, the agency that regulates day care centers, Bright From The Start, is “unable to immediately close down or cease operations of a child care learning center when a death of a child or serious violation occurs,” spokeswoman Stacey Moore said.
State lawmakers recently passed a law that allows for the emergency shutdown of a facility after a child dies. That law goes into effect Friday.
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