A Virginia woman has been charged with child abuse after being connected to jarring injuries a newborn suffered in a neonatal intensive care unit in a hospital where she worked as a nurse. But the full story sounds much more ominous.
Erin Elizabeth Ann Strotman, 26, of Chesterfield County, was charged with malicious wounding and felony child abuse, as stated in court records and by the Henrico County Police Division.
The arrest was a result of the police investigating three different babies that suffered “unexplained fractures” in the newborn care unit of Henrico Doctors’ Hospital in Richmond November and December.
In a statement, the hospital described Ms. Strotman as a former employee that received her nursing license in May 2019, and her certification remains active.
According to local news outlet, CBS 6, one of the alleged newborn victims was Black. The father of Noah Hackey, Dominique Hackey, explained that a nurse alerted him to his child’s shocking injury.
Noah has a twin brother, and the pair were born at 28 weeks and spent almost three months in the NICU in 2023.
“A nurse was standing over Noah swaddling him, looked back and said I noticed his left leg wasn’t moving, it was kind of discolored, I told the doctor on staff, got some x-rays, and we determined he had a fracture to his leg, so we are going to splint it for the next two weeks,” Dominique stated.
Noah was diagnosed with a fractured tibia and managed to make a full recovery.
Though Strotman has been connected to only a single incident, The Washington Post reported that officers are reviewing hundreds of hours of surveillance footage from the hospital to see what happened to at least seven babies between 2023 and 2024.
If found guilty, Ms. Strotman faces a maximum of a decade in prison for the felony child neglect charge and 20 years for the malicious wounding charge. Her next court date is scheduled for March 24.