The Day Our Daughter Got Hit

When our four-year-old was suddenly marked with mysterious bruises, my wife and I were living our worst nightmare. It only grew darker when we became the prime suspects.

Illustrations by Dakota McFadzean

While dressing for work, I noticed the cop out on my porch. At first I assumed she was soliciting for a police charity – until she showed me iPhone photos of my daughter with a green-black bruise across her forehead, and two heinous purple lumps perfectly level across her shins, like she’d been pushed over a curb. She’d also drawn on her arms in purple marker the day before. The policewoman worried the marks were adult fingerprints. She told me she needed to search my house.

“Of course,” I said.

As the officer inspected my four-year-old’s room, I silently sat and boiled, wondering how our little girl could have possibly gotten so hurt at school without anyone seeing it happen, or hearing her cry. Clearly our daughter had, at some point, been left alone for a good long time – and now we were being blamed for the results.

My daughter’s charter school had a D rating, but had won a presidential improvement award, which I’d written about for a local news site.…