The owner of a San Jose daycare where two toddlers drowned in 2023 is now pleading guilty to multiple charges including child endangerment.
Nina Fathizadeh is set to be sentenced in May and faces more than 20 years in prison for her role in the deaths of two 1-year-old girls.
Her mother, Shahin Gheblehshenas, who is a co-owner of “Happy Happy Daycare”, maintains she is not guilty and will go to trial.
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In October 2023, investigators say the two 1-year-olds, Payton Cobb and Lilian Hannan, slipped through a propped-open gate that separated a play area from a pool at the home daycare.
One other child was also found in the pool and survived.
The Santa Clara District Attorney’s Office said Gheblehshenas went to another unlicensed daycare that day.
She left four children with Fathizadeh.
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According to the investigation report, Gheblehshenas’s husband propped open the pool gate with a clothes hanging rack and did not close it.
While Fathizadeh was making breakfast, she left one child in a crib and three others in the backyard area unsupervised.
Investigators said that five minutes later, she discovered one of the children floating in the pool.
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She performed CPR. Her brother found the two other children floating unconscious in the pool’s deep end.
“The defendants had one job most important, above all, which was to return them to their parents safely,” said Deputy District Attorney O’Brian Kenney, “They did not do that.”
“They trusted these people, they not only were responsible for these children, they were being paid for it,” one woman told ABC7 News at an earlier court appearance. She did not give her name but said she is the grandmother of Payton Cobb.
“Nobody sends kids out into the backyard – three toddlers – to play by themselves,” the grandmother said.
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Both women were charged with felony child endangerment along with seven other misdemeanors charges.
Legal analyst Steven Clark said the defense will have its work cut out for them.
“I think it’s going to be important for the defense to start focusing on what notice that (the defendant had) about the possibility of that gate being propped open and having those children have access to a pool, so close to a daycare,” Clark said.
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