Background: The apartment building on the 500 block of Northwest 7th Street in Miami, Florida, where children are alleged to have been neglected (Google Maps). Inset: Anni Gomez (Miami-Dade County Corrections & Rehabilitation).
A Florida mother left her son at the home of a woman she didn't know — leading to the realization that the child had been hurt and two other children had been left to fend for themselves, authorities say.
Anni Gomez, 29, has been charged with child abuse and three counts of child neglect, all of them with no great bodily harm, according to Miami-Dade County jail records. The incident that brought the matter to authorities' attention occurred on Saturday.
Gomez contacted a woman on WhatsApp about "purchasing different types of tamales." Once she arrived at the woman's home and bought the food, she asked the woman "if she could take care of her children," according to an arrest affidavit obtained by Law&Crime.
"I don't know you," the woman replied, though she acknowledged she did provide child care services. They would need to discuss the prospect more, the woman added, per the court document, but when Gomez asked her if she could watch her 9-year-old son, the woman said, "no."
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According to authorities, Gomez did not take "no" for an answer. "The defendant opened the Uber door, took [the son] out of the vehicle, as soon as [the son] began walking towards [the woman], the defendant got back into the Uber and left the scene, leaving the child," the affidavit states.
It was then that the woman noticed injuries to the boy's face, and she asked him what happened. He initially said he fell down, but when pushed to tell the truth, the child divulged that his mother "hits him frequently," authorities stated.
"She hits me with her phone on the head and beats me daily," the boy said, per the affidavit. "She sometimes scratches me with her nails," he added, saying he didn't want to leave where he was "because he was scared of the defendant."
The woman called the police, and sometime later, Gomez contacted the woman, saying she was returning in an Uber to pick up her son. Officers would be waiting for her.
About 15 minutes later, Gomez was detained and brought into police custody. Within the next 40 minutes, officers went to the defendant's home to find her other two children, but no one was there.
An officer then went to speak to the 9-year-old boy, who had been brought to a hospital for his injuries. According to the affidavit, the boy recalled that while at home, he fell on the floor, "at which point his mother began kicking him … causing a black eye."
The child went on, saying "his mother continued to hit him in the head, causing him to bleed. He stated that she hits him on a daily basis and that he does not know the reason why," police detailed, adding that the boy said he wanted his mom arrested for what she was doing to him.
The officer speaking with him noticed injuries including the black eye, a swollen right cheek, bruises on both of his cheeks, clotted blood above his right eyebrow, and scratches all over his body, including his head, per the court document. A child protection worker was called to evaluate the boy.
An officer found the two other children who had been "unsupervised for over several hours." They were both boys, with one being 7 years old and the other just 3 months old. They had been brought to another woman's home after the 7-year-old child called the woman from an iPad saying his mom had left him and the baby alone and had not returned.
The same boy recounted that his mom left him with the baby because she "needed to go to do some errands." The other woman then picked them up and brought them to her house.
Gomez was read her Miranda rights — and after being faced with the allegations against her, she denied them all, authorities said. She was booked into the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center.
