An 11-year-old boy was arrested for the sexual assault of a 6-year-old girl at Delk's Happy Times daycare in Humble. The facility has now become the center of a lawsuit brought by the girl's family.
By STEFANIE THOMAS
Updated: 11.05.09
The family of a 6-year-old girl who was sexually assaulted by an 11-year-old boy at Delk’s Happy Times Learning Center on Isaacks Road in Humble has filed suit against the childcare facility and its owner, Carole Delk.
Court documents show that the lawsuit, dated Nov. 4, requests compensation in the form of actual and punitive damages, as well as medical and counseling expenses on behalf of the little girl and her mother. No dollar-amount is specified in the lawsuit. The court documents only identify the young victim as “Jane Doe” to protect her privacy.
The lawsuit was filed after an 11-year-old boy at the daycare fondled the child under a blanket while watching television in June. A report by the Department of Family and Protective Services, which launched an investigation into the incident, stated that the two children were “unsupervised by daycare staff” and that “the caregiver stepped out of the classroom and attended other children in the area.”
Matt Mussilla, the family’s attorney, said the incident should never have happened and that his young client may be left with emotional scars into adolescence and possibly adulthood.
“She had some bruises [after the assault], but aside from the physical pain, there is emotional suffering,” he said. “After this happened, the little girl had difficulty sleeping, a lot of nightmares. She’s been under the care of a therapist. There is no telling how this may affect her in terms of relationships in the future. She is old enough to remember what happened.”
A 2-year DFPS compliance check history shows that a total of five high-risk violations were found at Delk’s, including failure to conduct background checks on employees in Dec. 2008 and again in February of this year. In April 2008, DFPS found that the caregivers in two classrooms could not provide an accurate head count of the children in their care. In Nov. 2008, it was determined that the daycare director herself did not have the required FBI fingerprint check on file. Most recently, a July 21 evaluation again found a medium- to high-risk violation when two children were not strapped into their high chairs properly at feeding time. The results of an Oct. 23 evaluation are still pending.
The lawsuit claims that the sexual assault on Jane Doe is “a case involving profound neglect of a minor,” and that the young victim “was subjected to an unreasonably dangerous condition and activity due to, among other things, woefully inadequate supervision on the part of Defendants and suffered bodily and emotional injuries as a result.”
The petition further states that, “To add insult to injury, even after learning of the events, Defendants denied that they occurred and further denied any wrongdoing.”
In the days following the incident, Carole Delk, who has directed the daycare center for more than a dozen years, decried the DFPS’ official findings saying that the long-time family-operated facility had been “cleared of any wrongdoing.”
“We are not at fault,” Delk told The Observer in June. “When this happened, the teachers were sitting right there in the room, not four feet from the children. Our supervision is perfect. As far as I’m concerned, we don’t even know if this really happened until it’s proven.”
Delk could not be immediately reached for comment regarding the civil suit brought against her and her childcare facility.
