Daycare Workers Under Arrest For Dosing Children

Four Tennessee daycare workers were charged earlier this month with overdosing children under their care. It turns out that they were giving them up to 10 times the legal limit of the hormone melatonin so they would sleep longer.

Jaime Clark, 45, Kristin Clark, 22, and Jordan Darnell, 22, of now-closed MiMi’s Daycare in Indian Mound, Tennessee, were charged with child abuse and neglect on May 5 after parents filed complaints in March. Ethan Pulley, 21, was charged with fabricating/tampering with evidence.

An attorney representing nine of the 26 children who were overdosed said that a whistleblower had come forward and told his team just how high the dosages were.

“There was a whistleblower who came forward and talked to us early this week and told us she worked there for a day and during her employment they requested she give the students three 10 milligram melatonin gummy bears with their lunch,” attorney Rocky McElhaney said. “She didn’t feel comfortable with that. She didn’t do it and she didn’t report for her job the next day.”

The dosage of melatonin given to the children was over one and a half times the maximum adult dose.

Sometimes parents were unable to wake their children when they picked them up at the end of the day, Stewart County Sheriff’s Detective Dana Salthill.

“When they would pick them up, they would sleep all the way home and sometimes reports of children staying up most of the night, so their sleeping habits are off,” she said earlier this month. “They also made some disclosures that there was melatonin going on at lunchtime at the daycare center.”

Investigators said the children ranged in age from infants to six years old and that the daycare had been dosing children for at least two years.