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DALLAS, NC – 22-month-old Isabelle Niggel is getting better just months after being severely burned in a bathtub. Playing with her twin sister Annabelle, it’s hard to tell the trauma she’s been through. “She don’t wanna walk around with no socks on. She’s gotta have some kind of pants on,” her mother Carrie explains.
In June, Isabelle got into a bathtub at her home near Dallas, with scalding hot water running.
According to investigators, the babysitter didn’t hear Isabelle crying because she was listening to loud music in her headphones.
Isabelle’s mother says the little girl has had five surgeries to treat second and third degree burns to her legs and feet. She spent two months in a Winston-Salem hospital. “She was on a ventilator and stuff for a week. She had feeding tubes,” Niggel says.
Isabelle’s babysitter, Cassandra Willard, pleaded guilty to child abuse last week. A judge sentenced her to nine months, not enough time Niggel says. “Whether it was an accident or whether it wasn’t, there still should have been more than nine months in jail,” she says.
Willard was accidentally released because of a paperwork error last Thursday. She was brought back to jail the next day.
Niggel says she hasn’t talked with Willard since it happened, except for a quick exchange in court. “Said that she was sorry. But I don’t feel like it was a real sincere apology, but nothing I can do to change it I guess,” she says.
Friends have set up a Go Fund Me page to help pay for Isabelle’s surgery here: http://www.gofundme.com/a7da9c
