Corona sitter violently shook baby to death

When Adelina Palacios, 35, left her 13-month-old daughter in the care of her housemate, she could never have imagined that two weeks later the girl would be declared “brain dead” in Elmhurst Hospital.
She could not have imagined that her daughter’s caretaker, Dolores Guzman, 31, would tape the baby’s mouth shut with duct tape and shake her violently. Moreover, Palacios would never have guessed the alleged cause behind the attack - the baby’s cries.
If she had any indication that the woman she shared an apartment with in Corona would hurt her child, Palacios would never have left the girl in her care, said her friend Alicia Besquez, who described Palacios as a woman who was good with her three children and paid each a lot of attention when she was home from work.
On Monday, May 11, Guzman was charged with felony assault, reckless endangerment and endangering the welfare of a child after shaking 13-month-old Andrea Lopez Palacios. Guzman’s charges were upgraded to homocide on Wednesday, May 24.
According to published reports, Guzman, who has three children of her own, rented a room in her apartment to Adelina Palacios and her three children, and babysat the kids while Palacios was at work.
It was while Palacios was at work on the morning of May 9 that Guzman brought the baby to Elmhurst General Hospital’s emergency room. The child had no heartbeat and was not breathing. After 10 minutes, three shots of epinephrine and other life-saving measures, Andrea was revived. But bleeding in her brain, resulting from oxygen deprivation, has left her unresponsive and on a ventilator.
Guzman had told the hospital’s personnel that the baby was jumping on a bed and fell off, but her story was inconsistent, and as the authorities began to question her further, she admitted to becoming enraged at the child, duct taping her mouth and nose for up to a minute, pushing her to the floor, and shaking her.
“Three seconds of shaking is all it takes to cause irreparable injury or even death. In an infant, the shaking motion is comparable to whiplash in a car accident or when shaken in anger the force is equivalent to the impact of a fall from a second-story window,” said Queens District Attorney Richard A. Brown.
When Guzman noticed that Andrea had stopped breathing, she called 911, and an ambulance arrived at the apartment on 46th Avenue and 108th Street.
“This case is a grim reminder of the fact that never, under any circumstances, should a baby be shaken,” Brown said.