An 8-month-old girl arrived home from a day at her Winter Garden preschool with a complete, displaced spiral fracture of her left femur, and months later, nobody — not police, not child welfare investigators, not her own mother — can say exactly how it happened. The baby could not walk or stand on her own and had not yet pulled herself up to furniture, making the severity of the break all the more alarming to the family and investigators who looked into it.
The girl's mother, Mary Isidra Rojas Castro, dropped her daughter off at All Kidz Preschool around 8:45 a.m. on Aug. 21, 2026, and picked her up around 5 p.m. that evening, according to a report on the case also detailed by the Orlando Sentinel. That night, the baby refused her bottle, and around midnight, Rojas Castro rushed her to the Health Central emergency room in Ocoee after noticing her daughter was not moving either of her legs.
Hospital Staff Alert Child Welfare Officials
Hospital staff called the Florida Department of Children and Families to intervene once the fracture was discovered, setting off a cascade of interviews and investigations. DCF employees interviewed Rojas Castro during a follow-up visit at Orlando Health Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children the day after the ER visit, and law enforcement officers questioned her that same afternoon. A few days later, DCF staff and officers spoke with employees at All Kidz Preschool.
Those preschool employees said the baby had not been involved in any incident and had not sustained injuries at the facility, the report notes. Staff attributed her crying to simply having been woken up when her mother arrived for pickup, and told Rojas Castro that the baby had refused her bottle because she was being taught to eat sitting upright.
No Charges, No Video, No Clear Answer
Both the Ocoee and Winter Garden police departments investigated how the baby was injured and who might be responsible, but ultimately found no reason to charge anyone — either at the daycare or in the baby's home. Winter Garden police referred the case to Ocoee since the baby lives there with her mother and family. A Winter Garden detective wrote that it could not be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that a crime occurred at the daycare, while an Ocoee detective separately reported finding no probable cause that the baby was injured at home or that the injury was intentionally caused.
Investigators were hampered by a lack of video: the daycare's cameras had reportedly been out of order for four to five months, forcing reliance on verbal testimony instead. A law enforcement report noted that Rojas Castro had not been the subject of prior DCF investigations or calls for service to Ocoee police. The Winter Garden detective described All Kidz Preschool as very clean and organized, with children well supervised.
All Kidz Preschool director Anette Borrero told a detective the preschool had never had any children injured and said staff treat the children as if they were their own, according to the same report. Borrero declined to comment on the lawsuit when asked. The baby had attended All Kidz, which serves children as young as six weeks old and is located on Plant Street in Winter Garden, for five-and-a-half months before the injury.
A Doctor's Blunt Assessment
Despite the lack of charges, a doctor working with DCF told a detective that the injury was not incidental. “Nothing incidental caused this injury,” the doctor said, per the report. That assessment echoes broader medical literature on infant femur fractures: a 2025 review in Frontiers in Pediatrics states that “the fracture of an infant's femur should constitute a red flag to a pediatrician,” and that up to 80% of femoral fractures in non-ambulatory infants are attributable to physical abuse. The same review cautions that it remains extremely difficult to differentiate accidental from non-accidental fractures in infants, since very young children cannot describe what happened to them.
DCF ultimately took the baby from her mother's care from Aug. 25 through Sept. 28, before she was returned; she is now back in her mother's custody. DCF declined to provide additional information, citing Florida law that makes records concerning reports of child abuse, abandonment or neglect confidential and exempt from public disclosure. Under Florida Statute 39.202, such records can be released to criminal-justice agencies and, in some circumstances, courts, but not to the public at large.
Lawsuit Alleges Hours of Unexplained Pain
Rojas Castro is now suing All Kidz Preschool in Orange County Circuit Court, alleging employee negligence caused her daughter's injury and seeking damages of more than $50,000. The lawsuit alleges the baby endured between seven and 15 hours of excruciating pain without any medical evaluation, treatment or pain relief, and claims preschool employees never told her the child was injured. It further alleges that the staff's denials effectively misled authorities into suspecting Rojas Castro herself.
The complaint describes a femur fracture in a non-ambulatory infant as a red flag warranting careful evaluation, and it argues that similar fractures are unlikely to result from an infant twisting their own leg in a crib, rolling over, or falling a short distance, because those scenarios lack the twisting force required. Instead, the suit states that spiral fractures in infants are typically caused by forceful manual jerking, twisting, pulling or manipulation of the leg by an adult or older caregiver. The Frontiers in Pediatrics review similarly identifies shearing, bending and torsional stress as the three mechanisms of trauma that can lead to a childhood femoral fracture, noting such breaks can happen when a leg is held or trapped while the body rotates, or when the limb is twisted relative to the body.
The case echoes a similar dispute that surfaced in the Carolinas this year, where parents sued a Lancaster County daycare after their toddler suffered a broken femur and allegedly waited 14 minutes for help, according to Pracht Injury Lawyers; in that case, an employee was arrested and charged, per WSOC-TV. No such arrest has occurred in the Winter Garden case.
What Florida Requires of Daycare Staff
Florida law requires licensed child care facilities to meet standards covering health and nutrition, safety, developmental needs and sanitary conditions, under Florida Statutes Section 402.305. Child care personnel must also complete an approved 40-hour introductory training course covering health, safety, nutrition, and the recognition and reporting of child abuse and neglect, including training on recognizing and preventing shaken baby syndrome. The same statute mandates background screening that includes employment-history checks, criminal records, and sexual-offender and child-abuse registries from any state where a worker lived in the preceding five years.
For now, the central question behind the Winter Garden infant's catastrophic injury remains open. Police investigations have closed without charges, DCF's findings remain shielded from public view, and the lawsuit filed this month represents the family's attempt to get answers through the civil courts instead.
