NYC day care center where tot drowned had license suspended, facing multiple violations: ‘Gross negligence’

The Bronx day care center where a 20-month-old girl drowned earlier this month has been shuttered by state inspectors — who probed the facility after the Aug. 1 tragedy and found violations such as inadequate barriers by a pool, records show.

The sudden closure of Anna’s Butterfly Garden Family Group in Castle Hill is an about-face by state child care inspectors — who claimed to have found no problems with the facility during four separate inspections in the months before little River Edima Wilson died.

The conflicting reports from the state Office of Children and Family Services, which oversees child care facilities in the Empire State, has left reps for Wilson’s heartbroken family demanding answers.

“The daycare was certainly inspected, as I understand it, in May. In August, there are now at least nine violations that led to River’s death,” family lawyer James Williams said after River’s funeral Wednesday.

“So we hope that the state will take a closer look at how they are inspecting these home daycares,” Williams said. “I hope that it’s not the case that the state missed something. I really hope that’s not the case, but we do know there are a number of violations, and we do know the state was there.”

Williams also slammed the day care center for “gross negligence at best.

“A one-year-old child doesn’t go unsupervised and end up in a swimming pool unless someone who was responsible for her care completely fell down on the job,” he added.

The operator of the day care center, identified in state records as Ana Gonzalez Feliz, has not commented publicly on the tragedy — and has not even responded to River’s family’s questions.

The child care facility was stripped of it’s license on Aug. 6 and still has a slew of open citations for safety and health hazard violations, obstructed corridors and failure to notify parents of death or injury.

But the records show that the facility was inspected four times between March 5, 2024, and May 14, with no violations reported — and only after an Aug. 4 inspection were the operators cited.

State inspectors found nine violations during the final inspection.

“Barriers must exist to prevent children from gaining access to any swimming pool, drainage ditches, wells, ponds or other bodies of open waters,” one citation said.

Another said children cannot be left “without competent supervision at any time,” while center operators were also cited for failure to notify parents “immediately” in the event of a death or serious incident.

A spokesperson for the Office of Children and Family Services told The Post Wednesday that the agency “cannot comment on an active investigation.

“The safety and well-being of well-being of all children in OCFS-licensed day care programs is out top priority,” they said in a statement.

But Williams said the family still wants answers, and said the media was invited to River’s funeral in the hope that it would shed light on the system’s failings.

“The reason the family invited the media is because the daycare owners and operators and workers still have yet to come forward to explain what happened,” he said. “It’s only through attention from the community, which is brought on by the media, that hopefully these people who have already committed this despicable act will stop torturing this family and come forward with the truth.”

The lawyer said the tragic tot’s parents — Ima and Ifiok Wilson — weren’t even told for more than a year that the troubled child care facility had a pool on the grounds.

“They found out roughly one month ago, after river had been attending the daycare for almost a year,” the lawyer said. “[They] confronted the daycare owner, who assured them that the pool met all of the state regulations and rules to have a pool on the premises of a daycare.

“Unfortunately, we now find out none of that was true,” he said. “The pool was too close to the house. It did not have the proper alarms on the water. The gates were not secure.”