MIAMI – Officers arrested a Miami daycare teacher’s assistant after a co-worker — and a surveillance camera — caught her subjecting a 6-year-old boy to a barrage of abuse Monday, according to police.
Miami police said before Marlene Carballo was even put in handcuffs, she had already been fired from her job at Interamerican Learning Center, located at 1521 NW 28th St. in the city’s Allapattah neighborhood.
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Carballo, 52, of Little Havana, faces a felony child abuse charge.
According to police, surveillance video from just before 1 p.m. shows Carballo trying to force the boy to sit on a chair “by pushing his shoulders down multiple times and flicking his ear.”
An arrest report states that the video shows Carballo then pulling the boy by the arm, forcibly sitting him on the ground “while she sits on a chair behind him and wraps her legs around him so he can’t move.”
“While being restrained by her legs, (Carballo) hits the victim three times with her right hand and once with her left hand,” police wrote. “(She) then grabs the victim’s wrist and forces his hand to hit himself approximately ten times. (Carballo) is then seen grabbing the victim’s arms and forcing them down in between his legs.”
Police said Carballo then stood up and pulled the boy up, pushed him “against a cabinet” and hit him again.
By this point, the boy’s therapist saw what was happening and intervened, the report states.
Police said she went into the daycare director’s office holding the boy and told her, through tears, that “she needs to get rid of that teacher,” and, after being asked what happened, told her to “look at the camera.”
After doing so, the daycare director called Carballo into her office and fired her, police said.
Police said they went to Carballo’s home to bring her to the Miami Police Department for an interview.
The arrest report states that Carballo claimed “she was just holding” the boy so he didn’t hit her.
“When presented with the video evidence, she continued to deny hitting him,” it states.
Authorities said she “finally” made an admission, which was redacted from the arrest report.
Carballo, a Cuban national, was being held in the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center on a $3,000 bond and a magistrate hold, according to jail records.