However, investigators believe that she died much earlier – specifically inside the van where her mother, Kathleen Steele, 62, had left her three young children unattended for 38 minutes while she was inside a cellphone fix shop. The doctor told authorities that he did not find anything medically wrong with the child.
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The family’s North Redington Beach neighbors say the six-year-old brother apparently didn’t like the idea of a new baby. How will the woman and her husband be able to care for the child, critics ask. Steele ignored the 6-year-old’s comment, proceeded to complete her errands and later returned to her home in North Redington Beach, where she finally noticed something was amiss.
While Steele was inside, the baby began crying.
Officials in Largo, Florida, say he then removed her from the vehicle seat before “flipping her multiple times back and forth, dropping her on the floor, slamming her head against the ceiling, striking her in the face”. “Her face had just been pummeled”.
Detectives found blood in the van consistent with where the boy said he slammed the baby.
She had suffered severe head trauma which included extensive bruising and multiple skull fractures.
“This is a bad tragedy for everybody that’s involved and I’m sure there are a lot of factors that we need to find out that we can look into and kind of figure out exactly what took place and how everybody kind of move on a little bit”, her attorney, Robert Love, said afterward while describing her current state of mind.
Steele told deputies that she put the baby in a vehicle carrier, but she tripped going down the stairs and the baby tumbled out and struck her head – three days after birth. They said she disregarded him and stopped at another business before going home. The infant was blue and cold to the touch when the family reached their residence.
On the day of her daughter’s death, Steele brought her baby to a pediatrician concerned that she was not eating enough.
The neighbor saw that the infant showed no signs of life and called 911. She then called a neighbor, a nurse, to help. The children were running amok; the oldest boy was aggressive; she had filed for bankruptcy and lost her home; she was being investigated by child protection authorities. She had Kathleen and the 3-year-old boy through the procedure. The 6-year-old boy was born before her husband’s death. A report was made to the child abuse hotline. “We couldn’t have prevented this from happening”, said Sheriff Gualtieri. The baby was not strapped into the auto seat carrier, hit her heard and was hospitalized.
On Aug. 2, authorities were called by an unidentified individual claiming all three children were unsupervised.
“She was very aloof about it”, said Gualtieri.
As a result, Steele has been raising the kids on her own.
Her bond has been set at $100,000.
The six-year-old boy told investigators the baby started fussing and he tried to calm her. A dependency judge will determine where he will be placed, Gualtieri said.
The sheriff remarked that he had never seen anything like this case in his years as a law enforcement officer.
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Steele’s husband died of cancer in 2011 but she was artificially inseminated with his frozen sperm in order to have her 3-year-old son and newborn daughter, Gualtieri said.
