A police officer knocked on a military family's door late at night asking to check their child for injuries after watching surveillance video from his base day care. A nurse was about to see a hospice patient when she got a call about the military day care staff's potential abuse of her child. Another mother's phone rang with news of the abuse while she was at the home of a day care worker who was later convicted of committing it.
Those were some of the moments when Marine Corps parents said they began to understand the gravity and scope of abuse their toddlers endured at a child development center at Marine Corps Air Station Yuma, Arizona, between late 2020 and early 2021.
More than four years later, five Marine Corps families are still contending with the aftermath of their children's abuse, which resulted in jail or probation for two of the day care workers. Videos shared with Military.com show just a fraction of what happened at the Yuma day care, where police documented more than 200 instances of alleged child abuse and neglect, according to court filings from the families' lawyer.
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In their search for answers and accountability, those families have taken the government to court. At least three times, government defense attorneys have denied their claims that the Department of the Navy -- which includes the Marine Corps -- allowed the abuse and neglect to occur, with the most recent refutation filed in court last week.
"If we don't speak up or try to make some noise about it, these children are going to continue to be abused and they're going to be silenced," Mariah Wilson, a former Marine sergeant and one of the parents, told Military.com. "No matter how long it drags out and how much we have to suffer, if I can save another kid from getting hurt just by being loud, then I've done my job."
In November, the families filed a federal tort claim, which allows individuals to litigate against the government. The filing came after the Navy denied their claims in 2023 and then again last summer.
For Wilson and four other parents Military.com spoke to, their story mirrors a troubling pattern at multiple military child development centers recently: Parents begin seeing concerning behavior or symptoms of abuse in their children while military officials release scant information, causing confusion and alarm. Then, military day care workers are tried in civilian court following a law enforcement investigation.
In Yuma, two of the day care workers were charged and convicted. Valerie McKinstry was sentenced to nearly two weeks in jail and probation, and Katherine McCombs was sentenced to five years of probation.
Families often face bureaucratic barriers to obtaining evidence of their children's abuse at military facilities as they navigate the complexities of specialized child care and the legal system. It can result in a yearslong pursuit of normalcy after the institution they once trusted continues to deny responsibility for the abuse in court.
A spokesperson for Marine Corps Air Station Yuma acknowledged that Freedom of Information Act requests from the families were denied at the time "to protect the integrity of the ongoing investigations and legal proceedings" in an emailed response Tuesday to questions from Military.com.
Requiring families to use the often long, drawn-out FOIA requests -- a process typically used by journalists and the public to get information on government activities -- to see evidence of their children's abuse has been a core problem in such cases.
The commanding officer of the base during the abuse, Col. Charles Dudik, sent five letters to parents "addressing the incident" three days after police responded to the day care. The letters included invitations to open-house events that occurred more than a month later "to provide information and answer questions for parents and families," and FOIA guidance, said Capt. Owen VanWyck, the spokesperson.
Wilson characterized the letters as hollow and the open houses as a "dog and pony show of what they're pretending they're doing for us" with little in the way of answers offered to parents who showed up.
VanWyck said that, "in response to past incidents," the base child development center has updated its policies to require more frequent reviews of child care video and that it had retroactively reviewed random samplings of footage prior to the incidents, which is "retained for a minimum of 90 days." He added that prospective child care workers undergo "a thorough vetting process" and "extensive training" to provide quality care.
"The health, safety and well-being of children in our care remain the highest priority for out [sic] CDC," VanWyck said. "All actions and policies are guided by that commitment, and we continue working to strengthen trust within our military family community."
Opening Pandora's Box
"I felt really betrayed," said David Crosby, one of the parents who retired as a master sergeant after more than 20 years in the Marine Corps. "I expected more, I hoped for more, but it just doesn't aid in my ability to trust going forward."
Crosby was there picking up his nearly two-year-old son on March 2, 2021, when law enforcement flooded the facility following a report from the day care's director. The director, Laura Frank, pulled him aside to say his son was fine, but she saw staff "teaching inappropriately" and had to report it to police, he recalled.
Like some of the other parents Military.com spoke to, Crosby wasn't concerned initially. This was a place they trusted with their children. Maybe the situation was overblown, they thought. They did not yet know what specifically happened because no one had told them.
Crosby and his wife Brittany were home when a police officer showed up at their door and told them that a child care worker, McKinstry, had been charged with felony child abuse and they needed to inspect their son for injuries. It was like "opening Pandora's box," Brittany recalled as the magnitude of what had happened to their son began to sink in.
Katelyn Hitchcock, a CDC worker herself, was also initially in disbelief. She was at a friend's house when Frank called her saying her son had been involved in what happened at the center's Tiny Tots room. Frank didn't say which day care worker had been arrested, but Hitchcock knew because she was friends with McKinstry and was at her home helping her family when Frank called.
"I was backing Valerie up: I was like, 'There's got to be a misunderstanding somewhere; there's no way you could have done these things. They're saying you committed child abuse,’" Hitchcock recalled. The staff were her friends and she trusted them -- until, like other parents, the base Family Advocacy Program began showing them footage, often only once or sporadically in the days following the police response and with only one parent present, some parents said.
"As I was watching the videos, it just went downhill," Hitchcock said. "It went downhill so fast."
In videos shared by the families' attorney with Military.com, which represent only some of the footage that parents were able to get from the center after the government denied multiple requests for more, day care workers can be seen slapping the children, grabbing their arms or twisting their hands, dragging them -- sometimes upside down -- across the room or flinging them headfirst onto the floor, a shelf or a table.
On the day police arrived, McKinstry forced Crosby's son's head under a running faucet for several seconds before grabbing him by the armpits, dropping him into a chair and slamming his chest into the edge of a table. Other day care workers looked on without intervening and, while the videos contain no sound, the children often cried out or lay motionless on the floor.
"In my opinion, it's the only way that you're going to get the Department of Defense to listen," Wilson said of the legal claim, in which families are requesting damages ranging between $900,000 to $5 million each. "I don't feel like they care about me. They don't care about my kids. They don't care about anybody else's kids, but what they do care about is where their money goes."
"Hopefully, in the long run, they're going to tie it all together, because I don't feel like they're getting the big picture right now," she added, alluding to other legal claims from parents about child abuse at CDCs. "That's what we want from them. We want changes. We want them to listen to us and our children."
Lasting Effects of Trauma
For many of the parents Military.com spoke to, accessing resources for their children in the wake of the abuse was difficult at Yuma, and they had to travel hours away on a weekly basis to Phoenix or San Diego, California, for care. They received varying degrees of support from officials and programs on the base.
VanWyck, the spokesperson, said that base healthcare was able to "partially" support families at the time, but acknowledged "that some services were not available locally, and we understand the burden that places with having to travel to adjacent metropolitan areas to receive care."
"It was like fighting against something way stronger than me to get anywhere," Hannah Lucero, one of the parents -- the nurse who was about to see a dying patient when she was initially informed her child was a victim of the abuse -- said when describing the lengths she had to go to to get her child care.
Behaviors that parents observed in their children became alarming in hindsight. Initially, some parents chalked up increased crying, need for affection or tantrums as part of growing up or a response to being in a new environment away from their parents.
The Crosby family said their son, who is now 5 years old, didn't always respond to his name before the abuse occurred and "was a little bit delayed in his communication at that time," David said. But following the abuse, he started to hit his head against windows and drag his face across the ground; would become upset when trying to wash his hands; and if he did sit down for dinner, he would have to compress himself against the table "as tight as he can go," Brittany said.
Two pediatric experts with whom Military.com spoke on Tuesday, Dr. Robert Sege at Tufts Medical Center and Dr. Andrea Asnes of the Yale School of Medicine, said that children undergo rapid brain development in the first three years of life and that both positive and negative experiences can critically influence how they behave as they begin to understand the world around them.
But because children can vary widely at that age range, "and distress can show itself in lots of different forms, especially if you're too little to tell your parents what's happening to you," Asnes said, it can be difficult to pinpoint behaviors that are a response to trauma, which some parents said added uncertainty to their search for care and answers.
Both experts acknowledged that navigating those complex issues is stressful, especially when paired with the uncertainties of military life. But they also emphasized that recovery for the children is possible through safe environments, routine and support -- and that it is important for parents to receive help themselves because the experience was traumatic for them too.
But that path isn't easy.
"My whole family sacrificed ... that's what abuse does and I never knew the impact," David Crosby said, adding that he attends therapy after his family moved thousands of miles away from Yuma to be closer to relatives and where they continue to provide professional and personal care for their son. "We didn't have another plan. We've had to make significant changes and sacrifices and are continuing to do so."
Amid the personal turmoil, the families are preparing for the most lengthy phase of any legal claim: collecting witness testimony, documents and other evidence after an Arizona judge consolidated each complaint for the discovery process earlier this month.
"This whole situation has negatively affected the most important person in their lives, which is one of their children, and they've all suffered through it," Glen Sturtevant, an attorney for the families, told Military.com on Friday. "They recognize that there is a need for there to be reforms and changes and oversight and transparency and accountability, and they really are in it for the long haul to see this through."
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