SAN JOSE — The mother-daughter owners of an Almaden-area day care where two children drowned earlier this month have been arrested and criminally charged, accused of neglecting to ensure a pool gate was closed before letting the children roam free in the backyard, authorities said Friday.
Shahin Gheblehshenas, 64, and Nina Fathizadeh, 41, self-surrendered on Friday at the Santa Clara County Main Jail where they were booked then released after posting bail, records show. They have been charged with three counts of felony child endangerment and are expected to be arraigned Dec. 6 in a San Jose courtroom.
The arrests are the culmination of an investigation closely watched both locally and across the country after the deaths garnered national headlines and looming questions about how two toddler girls — identified as 18-month-old Payton Cobb, of Hollister, and 16-month-old Lillian Hanan, of San Jose — ended up in a pool at the Happy Happy Home Daycare on Fleetwood Drive the morning of Oct. 2.
Both children died after being rushed to a hospital. A third child, a boy, was found in the water with them but survived and is expected to recover.
An ensuing investigation by San Jose police and the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office determined that the three children were unsupervised in a rear patio play area while Fathizadeh was making breakfast at the home. The site was supposed to have at least two people watching the children, but a worker had called in sick that morning, according to a police investigative summary accompanying the criminal charges.
Investigators also found that the gate for a five-foot-tall fence that surrounded the pool had been propped open so that the homeowners could water plants in the backyard. The children were let into the yard, but “neither owner had checked the gate,” according to prosecutors.
“There is a responsibility to watch over little children in your care like a hawk,” District Attorney Jeff Rosen said in a statement. “Now it is our responsibility to make sure that these defendants are held accountable for this avoidable and heart-breaking tragedy.”
According to the investigation, Fathizadeh reportedly voiced concern to her mother about being able to watch over the children given the sick call and the fact that Gheblehshenas would not be on hand due to a medical appointment. But the parents of the children being watched the day of the drownings were not notified that they were shorthanded, police wrote.
Prosecutors are bolstering the child-endangerment allegations by citing detectives’ finding that when Gheblehshenas realized that her medical appointment was not until the following week, she did not return to the Fleetwood Drive home to provide relief to her daughter but instead headed to a second unlicensed day care site that they ran.
The criminal allegations also accuse the owners of knowing that Gheblehshenas’ husband was known to prop open the pool gate to water plants in the yard and that on occasion he would forget to close it.
On the morning of the drownings, detectives wrote, Fathizadeh let the two girls and a 2-year-old boy into the backyard and reportedly could see the unsecured pool gate but did not make any effort to close it. She then apparently proceeded to the kitchen and out of view of the children for at least five minutes.
When Fathizadeh went out to check on the children, she found the boy floating in the shallow end of the pool, pulled him out, called 911 and started CPR, according the investigation. But the girls were not tended to until she woke her brother, who was asleep elsewhere in the home, and found the two girls floating in the deep end of the pool.
The girls were pulled out, and the adults tried CPR on them before they were taken to a hospital, the investigative document states.
In the wake of the drownings, the state Department of Social Services suspended the license for the home-based facility and warned that the owners risked being barred from operating a day care again. They were also fined $11,000.
State regulators have issued multiple citations to the facility over the past year for a variety of infractions. The most recent was for not properly documenting their checks on sleeping children under their care. They also were cited in January for having one more infant than is allowed under their license.
But regulators never found issue with the pool’s safety after agreeing to license the facility in early 2021. As recently as January, state officials specifically noted in their reports that the property’s pool met all of California’s requirements for such facilities — noting that the pool was surrounded by the fence, which was made up of a “hard mesh” material that lets those outside see into the pool area and has a self-closing and self-latching gate.
Anyone with information for investigators can contact SJPD homicide Detective Sgt. John Van Den Broeck at 3829@sanjoseca.gov, Detective Amanda Estantino at 4339@sanjoseca.gov, or at 408-277-5283. Tips can also be left with Silicon Valley Crime Stoppers at 408-947-7867 or svcrimestoppers.org.
Staff writers Rick Hurd, Jakob Rodgers and Austin Turner contributed to this report.
