By Regina Galea and Helin Jung

On the morning of June 15, Chrisann Josiah, a foster-care caseworker, headed to her job at Queens Family Court, where she posted a status update on her Facebook page. “Today,” she wrote, “is going to be a positive day.”  She could not have known how differently the day would end.

On most mornings, Josiah followed the same routine: wake up at 6:30 a.m., get dressed, pack the baby’s bag with bottles, then wake the baby, kiss still-sleeping Daddy goodbye, and drive over to day care.

But on June 15, Josiah was only starting to get dressed at her home in Richmond Hill when her 11-month-old son, James Farrior, woke from sleep on his own. He jumped up, smiled, and threw a few of his toys around for good measure. It was a very unusual start.

When Josiah, 25, dropped James off each morning, she told the day-care operator, Kristal Khan, whom she referred to as Babysitter Kris, what to expect from James—whether he would need a bottle, or would likely be going back to sleep.

On that particular day she told the babysitter, who ran the day-care operation out of her brother’s home in South Ozone Park, that James was being especially active and that she thought he would be awake for the day.

At the courthouse, Josiah couldn’t stop thinking about her son’s smiling face. So she updated her Facebook status again, this time to say that she was going to throw him “the biggest Elmo party ever” for his first birthday.

Less than three hours later, James was dead, having drowned after falling head first into a bucket full of water.

Khan, a 28-year-old immigrant from Trinidad and a stay-at-home mother of two children, originally told police that the toddler had slept until around 10 a.m., when he woke and started playing with Khan’s children. She filled with water the knee-high blue garbage pail that she used as a mop bucket and went outside to fetch a mop from the yard. When she returned, Khan told police, she found James with his upper body submerged in the water, his feet sticking out of the pail.

Later, however, Khan retracted that statement, telling police, “I lied when I originally said I was looking for a mop and came back and found James in the bucket.”

She admitted to having taken the cold medication Nyquil at 6 a.m., even though she knew it might make her drowsy. According to her amended police statement, Khan had filled the bucket and left it in the kitchen the previous night. That morning, she said, she fell asleep in her living room, waking briefly and seeing that the baby wasn’t in the room with her before rolling over and falling back to sleep. Only when her son alerted her did Khan find the child in the water.

Khan was arraigned in Queens Criminal Court on a charge of endangering the welfare of a child and was released on $5,000 bail—posted by her sister Keisha— with the condition that Khan surrender her passport. When and if Khan is ultimately indicted, the charge could be increased to negligent homicide, which carries a sentence of up to seven years. Khan declined to comment for this article.

In a press release issued on June 16, Queens District Attorney Richard A. Brown explained the reason for the charge.

“When parents entrust their young children to a daycare center, the operator has an obligation to provide a safe environment,” Brown said. “By allegedly failing to carry out her responsibilities, a young child’s life has been tragically and senselessly cut short.”

Chrisann Josiah and her partner, also named James Farrior, are enduring a grief that every parent fears. But the search for child care can be complicated, especially in the gray area of low-cost, unregulated services.

New York’s Bureau of Child Care, which regulates both public and private services, classifies day-care centers according to the number of children being cared for simultaneously. So-called “informal” or “legally exempt” centers are allowed to operate without government oversight, provided that there are no more than two children being cared for at a time—excluding relatives of the day-care provider, of whom there can be any number.

Under these rules, Khan’s day-care center was unlicensed but not illegal. In addition to her own two children, ages 3 and 4, Khan looked after James every weekday and three other children spread out over three separate days of the week.

When James was three months old, Josiah returned to work to help support the family. She had wanted to take James to a woman who lived a block away, but that woman did not accept newborns, so Josiah turned to Craigslist.

There she found Khan’s advertisement, which featured a link to another, more specialized classified website on which Khan details her child-care services and qualifications. On that page, Khan indicates that she had been a primary-school teacher in Trinidad for eight years, has experience with children up to 12 years of age, and had recently been working as an after-school tutor. To Josiah, Khan appeared to be qualified, eager, and more than capable of taking care of Josiah’s young son.

The location was right, just a five-minute drive each morning, and Josiah didn’t have to worry about rushing back by 6 p.m. to pick James up.

The price was right, too—at $125 a week it was less than half of what Josiah would have had to pay for licensed, private care. According to Child Care Inc., private care in New York for a child under the age of 2 usually ranges in cost from $225 to $375 a week, and up to $20,000 per year.

Josiah, having studied criminal justice at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey, had worked as a child protective specialist for the Administration of Children’s Services, New York City’s child welfare agency. Her experience gave her a professional understanding of what a safe child-care environment looks like.

Josiah visited the Khan home, a pale green wood-slatted house in a quiet residential neighborhood, for an inspection. She got references from the families of the other children under Khan’s care. Josiah felt satisfied that she could trust Khan.

Parents “want their children to be safe,” said Carolyn Henriques, a parent-services coordinator at Child Care, Inc., a resource and policy agency. “They also need care that’s affordable. They need it immediately. That’s one of the problems, the need is so immediate that they haven’t planned for time to think it through or evaluate it.”

Obtaining a day-care license in New York State involves a home inspection, background checks, and fingerprinting for everyone who lives in the home, in addition to 30 hours of health and safety training mandated by the state. Providers are also required to submit their Social Security numbers, a fact that may prevent some day care operations run by undocumented immigrants from acquiring a license.

According to a report by the Center for an Urban Future, informal day-care centers represent a growing field of entrepreneurship for immigrants, particularly women. In 2005, roughly 8,800 family (caring for up to six children) and group family (caring for up to 12 children) day-care providers operated in New York. In all, these providers were responsible for approximately 61,000 children.

Those figures represent businesses that have expanded enough to require registration with the Bureau of Child Care, but unlicensed day care is harder to track. If a parent qualifies as low-income or receives public assistance, the Human Resources Administration will make payments directly to the childcare provider.

The paperwork produced by those payments constitutes a record of the informal day-care center, but New York has no method for tracking unlicensed businesses when welfare isn’t involved. The Day Care Council of New York estimates that about 20,000 unlicensed day-care providers operate in the city, though the actual number is probably higher.

“No agency is being funded to take care of these people, and they are not intersecting with formal agencies,” said Jon Pinkos, director of the Child Care Division at the Council. “No one is tracking this because it’s really a concern of individuals. It’s almost like a handyman service, frankly.”

Ann Witte, director of the Wellesley Child Care Research Partnership and professor of economics at Wellesley College, estimates that about half the childcare that occurs in people’s homes as opposed to group care settings does not abide by regulations. According to Witte, the number drops in more affluent areas, where parents do more of their own policing. In lower-income areas populated by immigrants, parents might be wary of the authorities or unaware of U.S. laws.

“We as a society have decided that we don’t want our children cared for in facilities that don’t meet certain minimum standards,” Witte said, “but we have exempted providers from regulations in most states, not all, that care for fewer than x number of children.”

The number of informal day care facilities, both licensed and unlicensed, continues to grow as more and more immigrants from Trinidad and Tobago, West Africa, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere arrive seeking employment opportunities.

Immigrant women with experience as nannies, nurses, home health aids, or—like Khan—teachers can easily make the transition into day care, a job that requires no formal education and allows women to earn income while caring for their own children.

Margarita Feliz, a policy analyst at the Day Care Council, said that people receiving public assistance tend to favor informal child care situations over larger operations.

“They feel more comfortable,” Feliz said, “because it’s someone they know—a friend, a family member, someone in the neighborhood. Sometimes they don’t know that they have the option.”

Cost is another consideration. To qualify for state childcare assistance, a family of three must have a gross income less than $46,692. That standard is two-and-a-half times higher than the national poverty threshold, which currently stands at $18,310 for a family of three. But for parents with combined earnings between $50,000 and $75,000, for example, day-care expenses can swallow a substantial portion of their income.

State licensure could give a child-care business a competitive advantage among comparison-shopping parents, but a survey of Craigslist notices for small day-care centers in Southeast Queens, where Khan advertised, revealed that licensed and unlicensed operations don’t necessarily charge different rates. Weekly fees in that area were around $150 regardless of the facility’s registration status.

In the end, having a license is no guarantee against tragedy in the day care industry. Beverly Bryant, the owner of a licensed day care center in Woodbridge, NJ, received five years’ probation for the 2008 death of an 11-month-old in her charge. Bryant briefly left the baby alone with a 9-year-old boy who kicked the younger child, causing fatal head injuries.

In July 2009, a 2-year-old boy in Bucks County died of advanced heat stroke after Rimma Shvartsman, the co-owner of a licensed day-care center, left the boy in a minivan for seven hours. Shvartsman faces multiple criminal charges including child endangerment and involuntary manslaughter.

A little more than a month after his death, on July 25, James Farrior’s family and friends gathered to mark what would have been the boy’s first birthday. Josiah has not been back to the house she shared with her partner and the baby. The child’s father continues to live in the house, but Josiah cannot bring herself to sleep there.

“Every moment that I spent in that house, I spent with my baby. Every day, every second, it was me and him,” Josiah said. “When I’m there, I don’t know what to do with myself.”

Josiah is on medical leave due to severe depression, and spends much of her time sleeping. She also spends a significant amount of time on the web, searching the baby’s name or Khan’s name “10 times a day” on Google and rereading articles about her son’s death.

“It’s still unbelievable to me that she would let that happen to him,” Josiah said. “Nothing is right anymore. Everything is twisted.”

September 2009