Steele was already being scrutinized by child protection investigators, Gulatieri said. But investigators believe she died earlier, inside the van where her mother, Kathleen Steele, had left the children for 38 minutes while she visited a cellphone fix shop.
Advertisement
“Those of us who have been doing this a long time have never seen anything like this”, Gualtieri said. Instead of going to the hospital, however, Steele went to a auto rental business to extend the contract for the van she was renting. Medical professionals diagnosed her with minor brain bleed.
The neighbor contacted authorities who had the lifeless baby transported to a local hospital, where her death was officially confirmed and pronounced.
Steele was scheduled to be evaluated by investigators August 1, but she canceled and rescheduled. The baby died before this appointment. “He said he took the baby and kept slamming her and slamming her”. The family traveled to a local store to get the phone fixed.
He added, the thought of a 6-year-old boy violently beating his infant sister to death is troubling enough – but there’s another troubling aspect to this case.
He said the baby was beaten and traumatized, her face was swollen, and her skull cracked in numerous places. What he was talking about when he pushed her up into the ceiling, he was holding her up, then he said he was flipping her this way and flipping her that way and she would fall. “So, the way he was describing it, he was tossing her around like a rag doll”.
Later, the son said again the baby was in distress.
Steele went on another errand with the kids still in the auto, despite baby Kathleen’s condition, to stop at a vehicle rental business.
A 13-day-old baby girl is dead in what Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri has described as one of the worst cases he’s seen in his career.
“Instead of calling 911, Steele called a neighbor who is a nurse”, Gualtiere said.
Monday afternoon around 4:30 p.m., PCSO responded to the Reddington Beach area for a report of a deceased infant. Rather than immediately taking her badly beaten infant to the hospital for care and/or calling 911 for emergency assistance for the little girl, the Florida mother drove to a auto rental agency to handle business related to the vehicle she was driving.
“It was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen”, the sheriff said. He said perhaps the most shocking element was that the mother didn’t seem to have any emotional reaction to the situation. The boy told her about the baby’s condition, yet she ran another errand, before returning home. She chose to have children after having her husband donate sperm shortly before he died of cancer.
According to the Tampa Bay Times, the three children were alone inside the vehicle for at least 38 minutes at the time of the incident on Monday.
Gualtieri said Steele was “ill-equipped to have a baby” and said police had been called numerous times by people concerned for her children. The financial advisor and her husband had been awaiting their first son. The show was distributed in 2009 by Discovery Health, per its IMDB page. The doctor found nothing wrong with the baby and later told investigators there were no signs of bruising or trauma.
“Frankie and Phillip, at 6 and 3, were running amok, unsupervised, and what others saw was consistent with what happened on Monday, and that she didn’t care for the kids and was negligent and neglectful and abused them by leaving these kids in the vehicle, the sheriff said”. In addition to her infant daughter, the arrested Florida mother’s 3-year-old son is also the product of artificial insemination. However, due to his age he won’t be criminally charged in the death of his baby sister.
Advertisement
What’s more, the sheriff said, Steele wanted to mother more children.
