When a child dies in someone else's care, families are given an explanation immediately and the real account much later, if at all. The overwhelming majority of these deaths involve a hazard that was already well known and already preventable.
Updated September 2026
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We want to be careful about how this page reads. If you are here because a child died, nothing on it is adequate to that, and a lawsuit is not a remedy for it.
What a claim can do is establish what actually happened, create a record that is not the facility's version, and impose a consequence that makes the same failure less likely for another family. Most parents in this situation say the same thing first: they want to know the truth.
The single largest category of infant deaths in childcare. Safe sleep guidance has been consistent and widely disseminated for decades: infants sleep alone, on their backs, on a firm surface, with no blankets, pillows, bumpers, or stuffed toys. Deaths in this category commonly involve prone placement, a car seat or swing used for sleep, soft bedding, or an unapproved sleep surface. Licensing rules generally require these practices specifically, which makes a violation straightforward to establish.
A child left behind in a room, a playground, or on a field trip; a child who gained access to an unsecured area, a parking lot, or a body of water. Facilities are required to maintain ratios and to account for every child, and attendance records, schedules, and door access logs establish what actually occurred.
Drowning can occur in very shallow water and in near silence, and it takes only a brief lapse. Deaths in facility vehicles — a child left in a van after a trip — involve failures of the head count and vehicle sweep procedures that exist precisely to prevent them.
Whether staff were trained in infant and child CPR, whether they recognized the emergency, and how long it took to call 911. Facilities sometimes call a supervisor or a parent before emergency services. Dispatch records establish the timeline against the facility's account with precision.
It cannot undo this. We are not going to suggest otherwise, and any firm that does is selling something.
What it can do is compel answers. Litigation produces the staffing records, the licensing file, the training documentation, the internal reports, and the sworn testimony of the people who were in the room. Dispatch records establish when the call was actually made. Families very often learn things through this process that no one was ever going to tell them.
One of our daycare cases illustrates the pattern even though the child survived: the facility permitted a dangerous activity that caused a skull fracture and a traumatic brain injury, and then failed to call for help. The failure to call is a recurring feature of the worst of these cases. That claim resolved at $850,000.
These are our published daycare results. Neither involved a child's death. Past results do not guarantee a future outcome, and every case depends on its own facts.
A daycare allowed a dangerous activity that caused a child's skull fracture and traumatic brain injury, then failed to call for help. Read full story →
A family's child was injured because of daycare negligence in St. Louis. Resolved for $600,000. Read full story →
Defense offered $0 and blamed the mother for her son's death. After five days of trial, a St. Charles County jury delivered $20,025,000. Read full story →
Contact sometimes comes within days, occasionally with an offer to help with funeral costs. Accepting help is reasonable; the release that may accompany it is not. A signature can end every claim the family has and, with it, the process that would have produced answers.
Staffing and attendance records, the sleep or incident logs, surveillance footage, training files, and any equipment involved. Send it in writing to the facility. Surveillance video in particular is often overwritten within weeks.
Licensing, law enforcement, and the medical examiner will each investigate. Those records, including the autopsy findings and the 911 dispatch timeline, are frequently the most reliable account of what happened and often contradict the facility's initial explanation.
Missouri's wrongful death statute sets a priority order among family members and the court apportions any recovery. For a child, the parents are ordinarily the proper claimants, and this should be established clearly at the outset, particularly where parents are separated.
Not necessarily. Sudden infant death syndrome is a diagnosis reached after other causes are excluded, and it is sometimes offered before any real investigation has occurred. Many deaths initially described that way are found to involve unsafe sleep practices: prone placement, soft bedding, or a car seat or swing used as a sleep surface. The autopsy findings, the scene investigation, and the facility's sleep records are what answer this.
Missouri's statute establishes a priority among family members. For a child, the parents are ordinarily the proper claimants. Any recovery is apportioned by the court among those entitled to share it, which is why the question should be addressed at the beginning, especially where the parents are separated or one has not been involved.
Funeral and burial expenses, any medical expenses of the final injury, and the value of the companionship, comfort, instruction, guidance, counsel, and services the child provided and would have provided. Where the conduct showed complete indifference to or conscious disregard for safety, damages for aggravating circumstances may also be available.
There may be, and the two are separate. A criminal case requires a higher standard of proof and is controlled by prosecutors, not by your family. A decision not to charge anyone does not prevent a civil claim. The investigative records generated are frequently valuable to the civil case regardless of the charging outcome.
Missouri's wrongful death filing period is distinct from the deadline for a personal injury claim, and certain facts can change the analysis. Separately, the evidence that matters most — surveillance footage, staffing records, witness recollection — degrades much faster than any deadline. Both reasons argue for speaking with someone early.
Yes, and many families begin exactly there. A consultation costs nothing and commits you to nothing. It is often useful simply to understand what records exist, what the official investigations will and will not tell you, and what is time-sensitive, so that whatever you decide later is still available to you.
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