A six-year-old boy beat his newborn sister to death after their mother left them alone in a auto, police have said.
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Those were the first words Kathleen Steele, 62, heard when she returned to her three young children she left alone in a rented minivan for the 38 minutes after she spent in a Florida cellphone fix store, police said. “And he was holding her up like this, and then said he was flipping her, flipping her this and that way, and then she’d fall”.
“It was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen”, the sheriff said.
As they were leaving the doctor’s office, Steele’s oldest son dropped his mother’s phone – shattering the screen, so Steele drove to a cellphone fix store in St Petersburg to get the phone fixed. The girl was taken to St. Petersburg General Hospital, where she was officially declared dead.
Though the infant was bleeding from the brain, investigators ruled the incident an accident.
When Steele returned to the minivan, deputies said, the 6-year-old tried to tell her something was wrong with his sister. “Something is seriously messed up with that”, Gualtieri said.
Yet somehow, the sheriff said, Kathleen Steele failed to recognize baby Kathleen’s condition. They said she disregarded him and stopped at another business before going home. Instead, she called her neighbor, who is a nurse, and the neighbor called 911 when they clearly saw the state of the child.
“The mistake is with the adult Kathleen Steele, not a six-year-old boy”, Gualtieri said. “(The nurse) recognized the infant was deceased”.
Steele, who once starred on the show “I’m Pregnant and 55 Years Old”, has since been revealed by investigators as having been watched by child services.
Steele conceived all three children through artificial insemination, in two cases after her husband’s death, using his frozen sperm, the sheriff said.
Unfortunately this was not the first time the infant had been in the hospital. The 6-year-old boy shook his little sister when she started crying, spun her, dropped her and slammed her head against the ceiling. It all could have been prevented had Steele not left her children in a vehicle all alone.
The newspaper went on to write that the Florida native had taken the baby to a doctor Monday morning because she was not eating properly. A report was made to the child abuse hotline.
She was scheduled to be evaluated by investigators on August 1, but she canceled and then rescheduled. “So, the way he was describing it, he was tossing her around like a rag doll”. 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. He said that it was troubling “that some supposed medical professional agrees to impregnate a 62-year-old woman with her dead husband’s sperm – and she gives birth to a baby that, by all accounts, she’s unable to adequately care for”.
When paramedics arrived, Steele did not appear to be concerned for the child’s health.
Kathleen Steele, 62, was charged with aggravated manslaughter.
Still he couldn’t believe the details of the 13-day-old baby’s death when he heard them.
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Steele’s two sons are now being cared for in separate therapeutic foster homes while the investigation continues.
