LOS ANGELES, CA \u2014 A woman pleaded no contest Friday to charges stemming from the bathtub drowning death of a 3-year-old girl whom she was babysitting six years ago.<\/p>\n
Lorine Washington entered her plea to charges of voluntary manslaughter and child endangerment, with a sentencing enhancement for causing great bodily injury. She was immediately sentenced to 14 years in prison.<\/p>\n
Washington was originally charged with murder and assault on a child causing death in connection with the Jan. 19, 2020, death of Talia Cook.<\/p>\n
An autopsy concluded the girl died by drowning and classified the girl’s manner of death as a homicide.<\/p>\n
During a preliminary hearing in 2023, Dr. Robyn Parks, a pathologist who performed the autopsy, said a 3-year-old should have been able to get out of the bathtub on her own. But Parks said she documented a variety of abrasions and contusions to the girl’s head, back, legs, buttocks and abdomen \u2014 none of which were fatal.<\/p>\n
Dr. Catherine DeRidder, who specializes in child abuse pediatrics, testified that she believed the marks to the girl’s body were not accidental and were consistent with physical abuse, noting that they had a braiding pattern that was similar to a phone charging cord that was recovered from the apartment.<\/p>\n
Los Angeles police Detective Javier Salazar said the defendant told police she was bathing her own 3-month-old son when she noticed the girl had urinated on herself and planned to give her a bath after she was finished with her son. She told detectives she walked back to the bathroom about five minutes later and found the girl floating unresponsive in the bathtub.<\/p>\n
Washington initially told police that patterned injuries on the girl’s back could have occurred when she laid her down on top of a cord and then pulled it out from underneath her, but she told investigators in a subsequent interview that she had hit the girl with a phone charger cord following an argument between the girl and her own 2-year-old son, according to the detective.<\/p>\n
The father of two of Washington’s children told police she had told him the girl tripped over a mop, fell into the bathtub and drowned, the detective said during the preliminary hearing.<\/p>\n
The girl’s father, James Cook Jr., testified that he sometimes needed a babysitter to stay with his daughter at his downtown Los Angeles apartment while he worked at a restaurant and that the girl was still sleeping and in good condition when he left her that morning with Washington, who had three children. Cook said he hadn’t seen any injuries on the girl the night before and didn’t know anything had happened to her until seeing a text message from Washington that she was on her way to a hospital, and subsequently noticed that she had tried to call him numerous times.<\/p>\n
Washington was arrested by Los Angeles police in April 2021.<\/p>\n
City News Service<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LOS ANGELES, CA \u2014 A woman pleaded no contest Friday to charges stemming from the bathtub drowning death…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":521777,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5123],"tags":[1582,276,2961,224,5337],"class_list":{"0":"post-521776","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-california","10":"tag-la","11":"tag-los-angeles","12":"tag-losangeles"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115908139245400788","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=521776"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521776\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/521777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=521776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=521776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=521776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}