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Thankfully, the dad caught it on camera.
By Ethan Cotler — Written on Feb 28, 2023
A family in Long Island has found themselves at the center of a nightmare after allegedly catching a nurse forcefully putting their newborn into a bassinet.
Police are investigating after a nurse at Good Samaritan University Hospital in West Islip, Long Island was fired following a video from a father of the incident.
A dad recorded a nurse at a Long Island hospital slamming his newborn son facedown into a bassinet.
A two-day-old baby, Nikko, was being treated with antibiotics and was under observation in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) at the New York hospital when his father witnessed the incident.
Fidel Sinclair was recording his son through a glass window in the unit. Luckily, the curtains happened not to be fully closed.
That’s when every parent’s nightmare happened. Instead of gently flipping him over, the nurse appeared to pick up the crying baby off his back and slam him facedown into the bassinet.
“I really wanted to break through that glass,” Sinclair said in an interview with NBC News. “I’m just glad that I went back to the room and showed [the mother] before I reacted.”
“It was heartbreaking,” Nikko's mother, Consuelo Saravia, said. “I couldn’t stop crying. I couldn’t even sleep.”
Saravia claimed that only one nurse was in the NICU at the time, so she confronted her immediately.
“I told her, ‘I don’t want you to touch my child. You just slammed him,’” Saravia said.
“She was like, ‘Oh, no, no. If you think I mishandled him or anything, I’m sorry,’” Saravia said the nurse responded.
Suffolk County Police released a statement that detectives are investigating in its Special Victims Section.
Catholic Health, the organization that operates the hospital, told NBC that they have since taken punitive measures against the unnamed individual involved.
“Upon learning of this incident, swift and immediate action was taken, including conducting an investigation and consequently terminating the individual involved,” a spokesperson for Catholic Health said.
“Additionally, we reported the individual to the Department of Health for further review. Keeping our patients safe remains our paramount concern.”
They further explained that curtains are “standard procedure” in the NICU to provide privacy for the patients. Fortunately for the parents, the nurse did not uphold that standard.
The New York State Department of Health takes the “disturbing allegation seriously.” However, since the case is currently under investigation, they cannot comment further on it.
Sinclair attributed his catching the nurse mistreating his son to a higher power.
“I’m happy I was there,” Sinclair said. “If it wasn’t for God to send me to go over there and check on him. We would have never seen none of that happen. And that would’ve kept happening through the night not only to him but to the other babies too.”
Saravia believes the nurse should no longer be working in her profession.
“[The nurse] shouldn’t be taking care of nobody,” Saravia concluded in her interview with NBC.
This incident comes off the back of an $8.5 million upgrade to the hospital’s maternity wing.
Mothers recently have access to private rooms after birth, while nurses take at-risk newborns behind the closed curtains of the NICU.
Ethan Cotler is a writer living in Boston. He writes on entertainment and news.