$1 Million Settlement After Three-Year-Old Found Hanging at Lancaster County Daycare

In September 2013, a teacher at Burbee Place Daycare Inc., located on West Meeting Street in Lancaster, South Carolina, took a group of fourteen children -- all under age five -- to the outdoor playground and distributed toys that included jump ropes. One teacher was the only adult present. At some point during outdoor play, the teacher found a three-year-old boy unconscious on a slide with one end of a jump rope wrapped around his neck and the other end tied to the top of the slide structure. Emergency responders transported the child to a local hospital; he was later airlifted to Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte.

The child's mother, Natasha Brazzell, filed suit against Burbee Place Daycare Inc. in Lancaster County Circuit Court (Case No. 2014-CP-29-00048), alleging the facility failed to supervise the children adequately and placed them in danger by supplying jump ropes to toddlers on a playground with raised platforms. In its answer, the daycare denied wrongdoing but admitted the children were given access to jump ropes.

Kenneth Berger, co-counsel for the family, investigated the daycare's internal practices and found that several teachers had not met state child-care training requirements. The plaintiff alleged those training failures were a root cause of the dangerous conditions that day. Berger noted that distributing jump ropes to three- and four-year-olds on a playground with elevated equipment violates basic child-safety standards.

The plaintiff claimed the boy sustained lasting effects from the oxygen deprivation: behavioral changes, difficulty with attention, disrupted sleep, and measurable reduction in cognitive function compared to his pre-incident baseline.

Circuit Court Judge Brian Gibbons approved a $1 million settlement on April 20, 2016. The amount exhausted Burbee Place Daycare's liability insurance policy limits. Berger worked alongside co-counsel David Yarborough and David Lail of Yarborough Applegate in Charleston.