An Oak Bluffs woman is facing a felony charge after police report that she left children she was babysitting in her car unsupervised for multiple hours during an incident that left one of the children in critical care.
Forty-year-old Aimee Cotton pleaded not guilty to charges of assault and battery on a child with injury by a caregiver, as well as a misdemeanor of wanton or reckless behavior creating a risk of serious bodily injury to a child. Her bail was set at $2,800.
According to court documents, On Thursday, March 13, Oak Bluffs Police responded to a 9-1-1 call from Cotton, reporting that a three-year-old she was caring for was unresponsive and had turned blue.
The boy, buckled into the third-row car seat of Cotton’s black Chevrolet Tahoe, was flown to Massachusetts General Hospital by helicopter.
The incident unfolded at Cotton’s Oak Bluffs’ residence. According to a report by Massachusetts State Police Trooper, Dustin Shaw, Cotton called 9-1-1 at approximately 1:16 pm, claiming she had left the three-year-old child in her car for about 15 minutes while loading items, only to return and find him unresponsive.
Cotton said she was babysitting the three-year-old boy as well as a one-year-old girl that day. According to court documents, she told police that she took them for a short walk on William Street in Tisbury at around 8:30 am, before returning home at 9:30 am.
In an interview with police later in the day, Cotton initially estimated to investigators that after the short walk, she brought both children back to her residence where they ate a small lunch and played with toys in her living room until she began packing to leave again, at noon.
But upon reviewing the footage of a 24-hour security camera overlooking Cotton’s driveway, investigators say they saw a different story. After returning from the walk at 9:22 am, police report that Cotton is seen entering her home with some items from her vehicle, but for the next three hours, neither child is seen exiting her vehicle; police said that Cotton did not return to it until 12:15 pm, where she briefly removed the one-year-old girl, bringing her inside for roughly 10 minutes, before returning her to the car.
In the Trooper’s report, for the next hour, neither child exited the vehicle.
First responders reported that they found Cotton performing CPR until Oak Bluffs Police and EMS took over emergency lifesaving efforts, transporting the child to the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital Emergency Room. The child was subsequently transported by a Medflight helicopter to Boston.
According to court documents, on Friday, Trooper Shaw, alongside Detective Millerick, interviewed Cotton at the Oak Bluffs Police Station, confronting her about her inconsistencies in her story. According to Trooper Shaw’s arraignment report, Cotton admitted that she left both children in her vehicle, unsupervised “the entire time.” Cotton stated that for several hours, both children were strapped and fastened to their car seats, while she was in her house cooking bacon in the oven, conducting personal hygiene, preparing her son’s hockey bags, and conducting several household chores.
Cotton’s phone and vehicle were seized, pending the issuance of a search warrant, and she was brought to the Dukes County Jail.
A pretrial hearing was scheduled for April, 28.
This is a parents nightmare, to trust your children with someone who was so blatantly negligent is horrific. I can not imagine the anguish that that little boys parents are feeling right now.
This island don’t need all those multimillion projects, that has appeared on the news. More then ever they should think of a safe of children and build a daycare project on this island. So sad that, those children is always at this kind of risk.
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