Police: Video shows beaten, burned child's 'absolute fear and pain'

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DANBURY -- When the mother returned home from work to find burns on her daughter's little hands and dark bruising around her eye, the first phone call was to the doctor.

The second call was to police.

What police saw that night on video from a nanny cam was the 3-year-old girl's terror at being beaten and burned on a hot stove by a 31-year-old woman who had been her full-time baby sitter for a year.

The baby sitter, Lidia Quilligana, is in custody on a first-degree assault charge that carries a 20-year prison sentence. Her bail is set at $1 million.

"In the footage, you can see the absolute fear and pain from the trauma in (the little girl's) facial expressions," Danbury Police Officer Thomas Geanuracos wrote in an arrest report reviewed by Hearst Connecticut Media Group. "At one point, I observed Quilligana pick (the child) up by the throat with two hands and toss her to the ground.

"I observed Quilligana repeatedly take (her) by the wrist and put her hands on what appeared to be hot stove burners," the officer said. "I observed Quilligana at one point jump on (the child) while she was lying on the ground and it appeared Quilligana applied all of her weight onto her and then pulled her pants and underwear down and spanked her ..."

The child's mother, whose name is not being published by The News-Times in order to protect the daughter's identity, declined to comment Wednesday, saying she did not want to jeopardize the case against Quilligana.

Quilligana, who is due in state Superior Court in Danbury on April 22, has yet to enter a plea. Her attorney, Jennifer Tunnard, was not immediately available for comment on Wednesday.

The officer's report gives new details about the afternoon of March 27, when the mother came home from a day of teaching to a scene no parent expects to find.

"Lidia, my nanny, told me that they had made pancakes and when she wasn't watching, my daughter had pushed her little chair up to the stove and burned herself, and that she got the black eye by hitting herself on the stove knob cover when she fell," the mother told police in a statement that night. "I called my pediatrician and was told to bring my daughter in immediately."

After seeing a plastic surgeon about the second-degree burns to her daughter's hands and leg, the mother went home to review footage from the video camera she had secretly installed in December, when she had become suspicious about bruises on her daughter's body.

"It showed Lidia hitting my daughter, force-feeding her something ... and then pushing my daughter's hands on the stove burner to burn her," the statement that the mother gave to police said. "The abuse began right after I left work (that) morning."

The officer said the suspect on the nanny cam appeared to be force-feeding the child something that was too hot to eat, which caused blistering in her mouth. When the child resisted, the nanny struck her, the officer said.

"I observed Quilligana repeatedly smack (her) across the face, each time knocking her to the ground," Geanuracos wrote.

The officer said he saw, on the video, the suspect attempt to damage child-proof locks on the stove knobs in an apparent attempt to corroborate her story.

The officer noted in his report that he saw only part of the video that the mother was able to retrieve from the recording system.

A prosecutor in court during the nanny's arraignment on March 30, and who had watched the video from the entire day, called it appalling and successfully argued for Quilligana's bail to be increased from $100,000 to $1 million.

"It is one of the most horrific things I have ever seen," said the prosecutor, Senior State's Attorney Deborah Mabbett. "You can hear the child screaming on the video as she is trying to get away."

rryser@newstimes.com; 203-731-3342