A Connecticut woman has been accused of staging videos to cover up her daughter’s injuries after police saw practice versions of the final product she showed them.
Advertisement
Felicia Marie O’Brien, 24, of East Hampton, was arrested Wednesday.
O’Brien told officers after the September incident that the child hurt herself by hitting her head on a bunk bed ladder because she has voices in her head.
According to the warrant, police received a report on August. 25 from the state Department of Children and Families saying that a DCF investigator suspected O’Brien of abusing the girl. The warrant reportedly revealed that O’Brien said the child hears voices that tell her she should cause harm to herself.
Police were not able to pursue the case because of the conflicting expert assessments.
“I’m hitting my head… cause I wanted to”, the girl responds, however her face and body bruising was inconsistent with what she says in the iPhone video, police indicate.
O’Brien was arraigned in Superior Court in Middletown Thursday and is being held in lieu of $250,000 bail. She also had a “finger-shaped bruising consistent with grabbing and squeezing” on her body. But the girl and her stepmother claimed she did it to herself, beating her head against a bunk bed ladder. She was transported to the Connecticut Children’s Medical Center in Hartford.
O’Brien’s public defender was not immediately available for comment.
When police interviewed the girl, she backed up the story and said she banged her own head on the ladder, according to the court documents. A doctor at the hospital told police the video looked “staged” and that the injuries did not appear to have been caused by the action in the video, according to court documents.
Advertisement
In one, O’Brien gives an audible cue for the girl to begin, and the girl moves her head between the horizontal rungs of the ladder to make it appear as though she is hitting her head, according to the warrant. In another, O’Brien seemed to forget her line, calling out, “What are you…” and then pausing before she finished: “doing?” Officers say she admitted that she restrained the girl during “outbursts” and admitted she videotaped the incidents and had two recordings on her phone in which the child appeared frightened.
