SOUTH JORDAN, Utah — One parent is concerned with a local daycare, while the owner says she did nothing wrong. FOX 13 spoke to both to try to figure out what exactly happened.
Hailee Page has been taking her 19-month-old son, Adrian, to Talia’s Tiny Tots daycare in South Jordan for 4 months.
On September 19, Adrian’s grandma went to pick him up and heard screaming from the daycare area. Page said she recognized that the scream was Adrian’s and coming from under the staircase.
“The door that it was coming from was actually a storage closet where there was a small pack and play," said Page. "There were no lights, no ventilation, nothing, the door was just shut, a child locked and my son was in there screaming with no one around."
The owner of the daycare, Natalia Howard, showed FOX 13 where the baby was sleeping, a small area under the staircase. Though Howard believes the door was open at the time.
“The door doesn’t have a lock at all, it is child-proof from the outside so we don’t have other kids coming and going and opening the door,” said Howard. “Everything was okay to do.”
Howard told us that that space had been inspected by the state and was safe for naps – as long as the door was open. According to the license and inspections for Talia’s Tiny Tots by the Utah Department of Health and Human Services, the inspections going back to 2020 say – “this inspection has no substantiated complaint allegations or citations.”
The last inspection was on June 20 of this year.
Here is the link to the inspections page.
“These children all have a very special place in my heart and I love watching them grow up and see their little stages of life,” added Howard.
Page said she didn’t know that the area under the staircase was a place where her son would nap.
“I think that’s one of the things that made me most uncomfortable was because nobody ever showed me that room," she said. "I was shown two other rooms.”
Howard tells me she has been running a daycare for about 7 years, and says nothing like this has happened before.
“I’ve been getting death threats, I’ve been receiving non-stop phone calls, name-calling," said Howard. "I’ve had to contact the police because again I have a daycare and I’m concerned that somebody will show up at my house.”
