Nanny Arrested for Torturing 3-Year-Old Girl Under Her Care

A 31-year-old nanny in Danbury, Connecticut, was arrested after a nanny cam showed her assaulting a three-year-old girl under her care.

The child suffered burns after the nanny, identified as Lidia Quilligana, put her hands on hot stove burners last March 27. The unidentified child also had dark bruises around her eye, according to a news report by the Newstimes and Hearst Connecticut Media Group.

Quilligana was charged with first-degree assault and can face a prison term of 20 years. Her bail was 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. "At one point, I observed Quilligana pick[the child] up by the throat with two hands and toss her to the ground."

He said, "I observed Quilligana repeatedly take [her] by the wrist and put her hands on what appeared to be hot stove burners."

At one point, Geanuracos wrote, the babysitter jumped on the child while she was lying on the ground and then pulled the child's pants and underwear and spanked her.

The child's mom declined to comment, the newspaper said.

Quilligana will appear in a state superior court in Danbury on April 22 and has not entered a plea.

The mom, in a statement to the police, said the nanny had a different story of what happened to her child.

"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. I called my pediatrician and was told to bring my daughter in immediately," she said.

After coming home from the hospital, she reviewed footage from the nanny cam she secretly installed last December when she became suspicious of her daughter's bruises in her 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 mom said. "The abuse began right after I left work (that) morning."

The nanny, the officer said, force-fed the child with something that was too hot and when the child resisted, she struck her.

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

The prosecutor who watched the video successfully convinced the court to increase the nanny's bail 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."