Justice for Emma: Day-Care Provider Faces Sentence in Baby Shaking Case

Sophie Crew dropped off her 13-month-old daughter Emma with a Santee day-care provider one Friday in September 2009.

Hours later, Crew was being told by doctors at Rady Children’s Hospital to prepare to say goodbye to Emma—being treated for severe brain injuries and placed in a coma.

“She’s a miracle, a complete miracle,” Crew said Wednesday from her Santee home after describing a harrowing ordeal with a chapter closing Thursday in El Cajon Superior Court.

Patricia Bernal, the day-care provider, faces a maximum penalty of six years in prison after having  pleaded guilty Feb. 15 to one count of felony child abuse, according to Tanya Sierra of the District Attorney’s Office.

Emma, now 3 1/2, is a “funny little girl,” says her mother. “She does smile.”

But she still suffers from the injuries of Sept. 18, 2009—which led surgeons to remove nearly half her skull to relieve brain swelling.  Emma bears a prosthetic skull, has lost peripheral vision and experienced hearing loss. She has some paralysis on her right side.

“If you were to see her in person, you wouldn’t know,” Crew said in a phone interview. “She can walk and talk,” although she’s “a little awkward socially.”

She’s attending a preschool a couple days week, said Crew, 33.

But in describing the crime publicly for the first time, Crew also acknowledges her own injuries.

She said she quit her job as a French teacher at Monte Vista High School in Spring Valley to care for Emma (and Emma’s older sister Ava, now 6.) And her marriage dissolved in the aftermath of a two-month hospitalization, when she never left her daughter’s side through a coma and three surgeries.

“I finally get to speak [about the case] for the first time in 2 1/2 years, and the impact on our family,” Crew said of Thursday’s sentencing of Patricia Linda Bernal, who court record says is about 63.  

Judge John Thompson is scheduled to hand down Bernal’s sentence at 1:30 p.m. in Department 11 of the El Cajon court. 

Crew said Emma had been in Bernal’s care only 12 days when she was called with the news of Emma’s injuries.

Bernal’s account of the injuries changed over time, Crew said.  Santee and Lakeside EMT and rescue workers were given different explanations about how Emma had accidentally hit her head against a wall in a Pack n' Play portable crib.

But the damage was so bad—a CT Scan indicated a “crooked brain”—that Rady officials almost immediately suspected child abuse—shaken-baby syndrome, Crew said.

She said the chief of neurosurgery at UCSD Medical Center was called in to help on the case. 

“They basically prepared us that she wasn’t going to make it,” Crew said. “The damage was so severe.”

But when Emma was stable enough for further checks five days after the incident, Rady officials detected massive hemorrhaging that was the telltale signs of baby-shaking, Crew said. 

“We didn’t know if she was blind or deaf,” Crew said. “Today she’s alive, overall doing much better.”

Emma never had the left portion of her skull restored. (Her head had outgrown the removed section.)  So for months she wore a helmet to protect her head.

Bernal told different stories over time—that she had witnessed the accident, that she hadn’t.  In the end, she decided to plead guilty and face the court’s judgment.

Crew isn’t happy with a one-year sentence for Bernal, the result of a plea bargain. She would like Bernal to serve 12 years, says the law provides this penalty for cases of felony child abuse with major injuries.

“It’s kind of ridiculous,” Crew said of the expected sentence, and indicated she would speak in court in an attempt to change the judge’s mind. 

“We want to make sure she gets more than 365 days,” she said.