03.31.09 - Mom: No one told me my daughter was choking nearby
The reason Lisa Raspanti says she took a job at Carousel
Day School last year was so she could be close to her daughter,
Olivia, when she started day care there.
But when Olivia choked on a carrot earlier this month,
Raspanti said no one at the Hicksville school came to get
her, even though she was in a classroom that she estimates
was about six seconds away. Instead, Raspanti said she continued
to work as an assistant teacher while her daughter suffered,
was treated by paramedics and rode to the hospital alone.
"She was being worked on in the hospital by the time
they got me," said Raspanti, 30, of Hicksville Monday
in her first extensive interview since her daughter died
March 17. "That was the whole reason I was working
there, so I could be near her."
Now, Raspanti said, she can't stop thinking that there's
something she might have done for her daughter if only she
had been there.
"A mother sees her child in pain and she knows what
to do," Raspanti said Monday, shaking, her eyes filled
with tears. "I'm her mother and I was supposed to be
there. That's all there is to it."
After Olivia's death, the state Office of Children &
Family Services, which licenses day care centers, announced
that the school's toddler program is illegal. The Nassau
district attorney's office has launched a criminal investigation
into the center. Law enforcement officials declined to comment
on the events Raspanti described.
Neither Carousel's owner, Gene Formica, nor his lawyer,
Robert McDonald of Mineola, returned calls seeking comment
Monday. McDonald has said before Formica did not know he
needed a special permit for his day care program, but that
the day care was well run and "this licensing issue
had nothing to do with the death of the child."
Monday, Thomas Foley, a lawyer for Olivia's parents, Lisa
and Anthony Raspanti, wondered whether Carousel officials
would have done anything different if they were operating
legally. "Did they make decisions based on the fact
that they knew they were unlicensed?" he asked. "Was
there a delay calling trained paramedics?"
A second lawyer representing the Raspantis, Joseph Conway
of Mineola, disagreed with McDonald's assertion that Olivia's
death was not connected to the day care's lack of a license.
"This was a preventable tragedy," said Conway,
noting that everything from how many staff members were
in the room at the time, to their training, to what they
were feeding the children would have been affected by the
school's compliance with state regulations. "Our goal
here is to make sure that nothing like this ever happens
again."
The Raspantis have hired lawyers to monitor the criminal
investigation into Carousel. They have not decided whether
to file a civil lawsuit.
Lisa Raspanti, who had been working at Carousel since last
February, said she knew only that the school was chartered
by the state Department of Education, and assumed their
toddler program was legitimate, too.
"You assume everything is OK," she said. "If
I knew then what I know now, my daughter would never have
been there."
Raspanti said she collapsed on the floor when someone told
her Olivia had choked and had left in an ambulance.
By the time she got to Nassau University Medical Center,
doctors told her that her daughter was being kept alive
"minute by minute." They let Raspanti see her
before she went into surgery, telling her first that the
child might not make it.
"She couldn't even close her eyes," Raspanti
said, collapsing in tears. "They had to put bandages
over them so her eyes wouldn't dry."
Raspanti said Olivia, whom she called "Livi"
was gentle, smart and - even as a toddler - incredibly generous.
"She was perfect," she said.
Raspanti has a photo she took with her cell phone of Olivia
the night before she died, helping her mom take care of
a friend's baby. The little girl with wide brown eyes looks
lovingly at the baby, holding its bottle for it and helping
to feed it Cheerios.
"If I had known that my baby was going to die 13 hours
later, I would have never slept that night," Raspanti
said weeping. "I would have just held her."
- Ann Givens: Newsday
Staff Writer
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