Day care worker faces assault charge for taping 4-year-old boy's mouth

A Wake County woman is facing an assault charge after a video shows she taped a 4-year-old boy’s mouth at a day care and jerked him by the arm.

Officers arrested Moni Kumari on Tuesday and charged her with assault on a child younger than 12 years old.

A Cary mother who sends her son to Chesterbrook Academy, where Kumari works, said the incident happened on Nov. 21. The mother did not want to be identified.

“I only asked him like, ‘Were you in timeout and you did something?’” she said. “And he said, ‘No mommy. I was in timeout and she put a tape on my mouth because I was humming.’”

The mother went to the school to see the classroom video herself, and found Kumari putting tape on her son's face and ripping it off, twice.

"It's unbelievable how a 4-year-old has to live with something like that in his little mind and remember being put in timeout and then having someone put tape on him,” she said.

In another video from that day, the teacher is seen grabbing the boy by the arm and jerking him to the side.

"I'm sure this was not the first time that he's been treated like that by her,” the boy’s mother said.

The boy’s mother took her concerns to the police.

She said Chesterbrook Academy acted quickly. She said administrators told her that Kumari would no longer be working there.

The mother encourages other parents to take their children's messages seriously.

"You need to pay attention, when your kid is not feeling good going somewhere, you need to find out what is going on, because if a kid is not happy at some place, there has to be a reason,” she said.

WRAL News has reached out to Chesterbrook Academy for information about Kumari's current employment status.

School administrators said they are investigating.