THURSDAY NEWS LINKS:

Tearful Mothers Take Stand as Day Care Fire Trial Begins

Posted byHoumanitarian

(B. Rogers & E. Mulvaney, Houston Chronicle)
It’s a choice no mother should have to face. Tiffany Dickerson had to decide between seeing her daughter in an emergency room or her son in the morgue after the siblings burned in a home day care fire in west Houston last year.

“The medical examiner was supposed to hold him for me,” Dickerson testified about the death of 3-year-old Shomari. She stayed with Makayla, now a 3-year-old whose legs are scarred from the burns. “I never got to see him again.”

Dickerson was the first of four mothers to testify Wednesday in an emotional Harris County courtroom against Jessica Tata, the 24-year-old woman accused of killing four toddlers in the blaze on Feb. 24, 2011. Tata is accused of leaving the children alone to go grocery shopping as a fire broke out because a pot of oil was left on a hot burner.

During opening statements, a prosecutor said Tata even told a Target employee that she had left her stove burning at her home. Tata’s defense attorneys called it a frantic realization. Prosecutors called it a betrayal.

“She obtained the trust of six families,” prosecutor Steve Baldassano told the jury. “And she betrayed that trust.”

Baldassano said cellphone records, receipts and surveillance footage from several stores will show that Tata repeatedly left the children alone in the 24 hours before the fire that killed 16-month-old Elias Castillo, 3-year-old Shomari Leon Dickerson, 20-month-old Kendyll Stradford and 19-month-old Elizabeth Kajoh.

The children’s mothers each testified Wednesday about the last time they saw their children alive.
(Read the full story at the Houston Chronicle)

Additional Coverage:

LOCAL AREA HEADLINES:

STATE, NATION & WORLD: