By Micah Gerola
Lack of proper supervision? Abusive staff? Negligent hiring and training? These might sound like headlines for an overrun sweatshop, but this is exactly what occurred at a childcare center on a Marine Corps base in Yuma, Arizona.
On March 2, 2021, five families received a call from local authorities stating that a whistle-blower had reported pertinent information that 1-2-year-old children in the “Tiny Tots” room at a Child Development Center on Marine Corps Air Station Yuma were being physically abused by three childcare providers.
The federal government is granted sovereign immunity, which affects the families’ ability to file damage claims by the traditional method. Instead, they were prompted to file claims under the Federal Torts Claims Act, which allows civilians to take legal action against the federal government for negligence. The claims were filed with the Department of the Navy but were immediately denied.
“When we got the case, the federal tort claims had already been filed and denied once,” explained Glen Sturtevant, a trial lawyer attorney for Rawls Law Group and Veterans Serving Veterans, who is representing all five families. “And you have the ability to request reconsideration from the Navy, which is great. It’s not really an appeal, but you’re asking them to look at it again, assign it to a new investigator and you give it that extra shot to hopefully — and for the right cases — try to get a settlement early because oftentimes that’s better for the client because you don’t have all the costs of a lawsuit.”
Glen is a trial lawyer with experience representing clients with complex litigation, specifically medical malpractice and healthcare litigation, such as Federal Tort Claims against the Department of Veteran Affairs, Indian Health Service, federally funded hospitals and clinics, military, vaccine injuries, mass tort, product defect claims, and commercial disputes.
As a graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law and National Trial Advocacy College, in his early days as a lawyer Glen was involved in the Young Lawyers Association of the State Bar, where he provided pro bono legal services for Virginia locals devastated by natural disasters, mass emergencies, and terrorist attacks affecting the commonwealth. In addition to advocating for his client, he was also elected to the Virginia State Senate.
“I started out on the school board in the city of Richmond here in the Virginia State Capitol and served a term on the school board. I got elected to the state Senate in 2015 and lost in 2019, and then ran again in 2023 and then won the seat back,” Glen shares about his involvement in public service. Glen is dedicated to serving his community and is consistently recognized as a Rising Star in Virginia Super Lawyers’ peer-ranked guide to top lawyers in his region. He was named a Leader in the Law by Virginia Lawyers Weekly.
Due to federal regulations, each of the rooms where kids were present was actively being monitored by multiple video cameras in different locations within the rooms with various points of view. Because their children were being heavily monitored and were not coming home with signs of abuse, none of these parents raised concerns or even suspected the horrific abuse that was happening.
Unfortunately, all video footage captured longer than 90 days ago was scrubbed and overwritten. However, the surveillance footage that was still viewable showed chilling evidence that revealed hundreds of instances where the children were being slapped, yanked by the arm, and had their chairs pulled out from under them. One of the providers, Valerie McKinstry, 30, served a two-week jail sentence and probation while Katherine McCombs, 30, only received probation. The third provider, Maria Mendez did not receive criminal charges.
“They [parents of the victims] are not enthusiastic about one of them only getting two weeks in jail or the other one just getting probation, but I think at the very least it means that neither of them is working in a childcare setting again. But, these clients are just good people. They’re all enlisted men. They just want their kids to be taken care of and their kids have been made worse off as a result of this. And the Navy needs to make good on that commitment. They offered this service. They portrayed it as it was going to be a safe place for their kids to go every day. And it wasn’t and their kids are worse off. And the system needs to compensate them for that.”
Despite the criminal charges against two of the three caretakers and the indisputable video evidence, a second Navy investigator reviewed the cases and denied them for a second time without any substantive reasoning.
“One of the things that I hold out hope for — and this is maybe too hopefully — is the Navy figures the value of the cases was too high so they have some limits on what they can pay in that administrative phase. There are higher limits on what could be paid in litigation. Maybe that’s just me being the plaintiff’s lawyer and maybe thinking the glass has to be half-full, but maybe their thought process in denying the claims was in order to adequately compensate these folks that needed to be in litigation where there’s more compensation available than the administrative phase. That would be nice if that plays out.”
The Rawls Law Group is a unique plaintiff’s firm that specializes in Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) cases in medical malpractice in all fifty states, representing veterans, service members, and their family members who have been injured at VA hospitals, military hospitals, and federally funded clinics. Originally founded in 1996 by Brewster Rawls, the firm is made up of former military service members who understand the challenges veterans and service members face when dealing with the Veterans Administration and the healthcare system.
After the second denial, Glen and the firm decided to file a traditional negligence lawsuit. The lawsuits have been filed in the federal court in the District of Arizona in Phoenix and the federal government is being defended by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Phoenix. “Because it’s sovereign immunity and the federal government, you can’t get a jury in these cases. It’s a bench trial. So, we filed suit in all five cases, all on the same day, right before Thanksgiving 2024,” Glen states about the filing process.
The childcare center bolstered several red flags regarding its security and priority of provider training which could have potential implications for systemic reform. “That’s really the crux of the negligence claim against the government based on how they were running this place and keeping these people employed. You can see in the videos: there are windows all over the place that are in direct line of sight from people who are in charge, who are in the chain of command, who knew or should have known or had reason to know that something was going on here because it was done so often and right out in the open. It wasn’t just like you had this one bad actor in the room with all these kids. They just didn’t say anything about it,” Glen states about the evident negligence amongst the childcare staff.
As they enter the litigation stage, Glen recognizes the possible challenges the Plaintiffs may face along the way. “We may see something along the lines of them [the Government] saying that this was an isolated and intentional conduct on the part of these bad actors, but that doesn’t address the fact that they still have negligent hiring retention and training.”
The psychological and emotional damage to all five kids is another juggernaut in the case. All kids experienced different forms and levels of abuse and will therefore have varying levels of trauma. These types of damages can be viewed differently by a judge vs. a jury. “This is one of the challenges in a bench trial vs. a jury trial — you don’t get the benefit of your peers and the ability of multiple people discussing something, having all seen the same evidence to hash out,” he says about having a bench trial over a jury trial.
All five cases have been assigned to different judges and served to the United States Attorney General and the United States Attorney in Phoenix. “Because it’s the federal government, they get 60 days to file responsive pleadings rather than your normal 30 days to respond,” says Glen about another advantage the federal government possesses.
Glen and the families are currently awaiting a responsive pleading and will potentially receive it in January or February of 2025. Glen hopes to achieve systemic reform and hold the federal government accountable for its negligence towards its service members and their families.
Below is the complete interview with Attorney Glen Sturtevant with the Trial Lawyer’s Journal:
Chad Sands: If you could start talking about this case by explaining what these child development centers are and how that works with the military?
Glen Sturtevant: So this is a Marine Corps Air Station Yuma in Yuma, Arizona, and like many military bases around the country and around the world, it’s a full service operation for the active duty military and a lot of them have their families and have their kids, jobs, either on base or off base. And so you need a place for the kids to go during the day. And so this Marine Corps base offered a child care center program to children of the active duty Marines that were there. Thankfully per federal regulations, the rooms where the kids were being watched had video cameras in them, like multiple cameras in different, different locations and points of view.
So these parents — they didn’t think they had a problem. Their kids weren’t coming home with bruises or anything like that and they were also very young. This was the “Tiny Tots” is what they called it at the base. And so they were kids that were between the ages of one and two.
So these were kids that maybe could say a word here or there, “Mama,” “Dad,” but not a whole lot beyond that to express themselves. So one day back in March of 2022, these five families got a call from the local Yuma Police Department that a whistleblower had blown the whistle on a couple of the providers in this “Tiny Tots” room revealing they were abusing the kids — that the providers were physically abusing the kids.
To the police’s credit, they got involved and they showed up and demanded the video recordings from the surveillance videos. What was interesting was the videos were deleted and overwritten every 90 days. So they were only able to get the most recent three months of video footage from the “Tiny Tots” room, and unfortunately, we can’t go back beyond that to know what was or wasn’t done to these kids.
But they were able to get a lot of footage from the three months leading up to when the whistleblower notified the police and there are hundreds of instances among these five kids being slapped around and yanked by their arm.
I’ve seen the videos. We got them from the Yuma police department and they’re hard to watch. Like if a child wasn’t sitting perfectly still in the seat, one of the abusers would pull the chair out from under them so they’d fall on the ground.
That was just one example, but it’s something that happened multiple, multiple times over this three month period. So, the five families got together and hired a lawyer before ever coming to us.
And because it’s against the government, you’re dealing with a United States military base. It’s a case against the government because of sovereign immunity. You just can’t sue them like you would a regular private daycare in your town.
It’s called the Federal Tort Claims Act that’s been around for a hundred years. And it’s the way that you sue the government for negligence. Typically in our firm, we specialize in these FTCA cases in the medical malpractice space.
Chad Sands: Yes, I interviewed Brewster Rawls (“Celebrating Justice” – Ep. 14) and know your guys’ firm is one of the leading FTCA firms in the country.
Glen Sturtevant: Yes,we handle medical malpractice cases representing veterans and their family members who have been injured at VA hospitals and military hospitals and federally funded clinics in all 50 states. That’s our area of expertise.
So these families hired a local Arizona lawyer who filed these FTCA claims — which is what you always have to do with the Department of the Navy. Because it’s the Marines, you got to go through the Department of the Navy and for whatever reason — it’s inexplicable to me — the Navy denied the claims, which is basically them saying we’re not going to settle the case with you.
That’s why you file the claim, so that the agent — the federal agency — can investigate it and decide if they want to settle before a lawsuit is filed.
Chad Sands: Were you surprised the Navy denied the claim originally?
Glen Sturtevant: Yeah. I mean, it’s on video. It’s on video. The police arrested these daycare providers. One of them had to serve jail time. Two of them got probation, so it’s not really a question.
Now there may be legal duty arguments that the government raises. Now that we’re in litigation to try to get the claims dismissed, we’ve researched some of that and feel good that we’re on solid ground that they have negligence around hiring retention and training and cause of action big time. And that doesn’t have anything to do with the intentional criminal acts of the employees.
Long story short, I don’t really know why the Navy denied the claim.
Chad Sands: So, you guys were actually the second law firm to take the case?
Glen Sturtevant: Right. When we got the case, the Federal Tort Claims had already been filed and denied once. And then once they got the denials, you have the ability to request reconsideration from the Navy, which is great. It’s not really an appeal, but you’re asking them to look at it again, assign it to a new investigator and you give it that extra shot to hopefully — and for the right cases — to try to get a settlement early because oftentimes that’s that’s better for the client because you don’t have all the costs of a lawsuit.
Chad Sands: Can you explain a little bit more about that? The pros and cons of taking an FTCA case to trial?
Glen Sturtevant: Our fee in these cases is actually set by federal law and our fee is actually lower in the administrative phase than it is in litigation. So a lower fee, a lot lower costs can oftentimes result in a better net recovery for the clients. So we requested reconsideration. The Navy looked at it again. And again, they didn’t give us any substantive reason and denied it a second time.
And so, at that point, under the FTCA, we then have the ability to file a traditional negligence suit. For folks who don’t know a lot about FTCA cases, what’s different in these FTCA cases is obviously you have to file it in federal court. So we filed in the district of Arizona in Phoenix.
But again, because it’s sovereign immunity and federal government has been able to sort of decide what they’re going to allow and what they’re not going to allow. You can’t get a jury in these cases. It’s a bench trial. So we filed suit in all five cases right before Thanksgiving in 2024.
Now we are now off to the races with with the litigation aspect of it. And we’re no longer in the claims process. Now it’s a typical negligence case, but because it’s in federal court and against the government, they’re defended by the U. S. Attorney’s Office in Phoenix. It’s their civil division.
Chad Sands: I know you guys specialize in MedMal FTCA cases — are there a lot of negligence FTCA cases out there?
Glen Sturtevant: There are cases here and there against the post office. Like if the postman runs over your dog or something or your mailbox, that kind of stuff.
Chad Sands: Yep.
Glen Sturtevant: I don’t have any hard data on what those numbers look like in, in the non medical malpractice area —
Chad Sands: It’s significantly less.
Glen Sturtevant: Correct. The vast majority of FTCA cases are MedMal.
Chad Sands: Going back was the whistleblower. When he/she discovered that there was something wrong — I assume that she would have to go to the police on the Marine base. Or did she go straight to the Yuma (city) police department?
Glen Sturtevant: Well, a lot of this stuff is what we’re going to have to find out in discovery. We have to base a lot of what we know based on what the parents told us, but also on the police reports and that sort of thing but to uncover that information that has to be tackled in the discovery process.
Chad Sands: Could you talk a little bit about the potential challenges you see in litigating this type of negligence FTCA case against the government versus MedMal.
Glen Sturtevant: We’ll have to see what motions, if any, the government throws at us. We may see something along the lines of them saying that this was intentional conduct on the part of these bad actors. But that doesn’t address the fact that they still have negligent hiring, retention and training.
The other issue I think is damages. The five kids all have varying levels of lasting effects from the abuse. The five kids all experienced different levels of abuse. Some got it worse than others. And so this is kind of one of the challenges where in a bench trial rather than a jury trial — you don’t get the benefit of a collection of your peers. You also don’t get the outcome of multiple people discussing something, having all seen the same evidence to kind of hash out a fair result.
Don’t get me wrong. Federal judge always comes to a fair result in a case like this, but there’s something to be said for the jury trial of having just folks off the street, using their common sense to be able to assess what these kids and their families deserve.
Then the other issue is — this was three years ago. So the kids are still pretty young. And so trying to understand how this may or may not affect them and in what ways over the course of their lifetimes is challenging. There’s just a lot we don’t know. From a neurocognitive standpoint, on causality issues of what causes certain things.
But, this is pretty bad, pretty disgusting, abusive behavior by these people. And it’s all in color on video. And I showed it to my wife and made her cry. It was that bad.
Chad Sands: Were these three bad actors contained to the “Tiny Tots” room?
Glen Sturtevant: As far as we know, because those are the parents who have come to us. I’m not aware of other cases that there are other victims.
Chad Sands: There was a completely separate criminal trial where some of them were charged. You talked about it a little bit but how have you guys been talking or addressing the emotional and long term impacts, right?
Glen Sturtevant: Yeah, it’s gonna be tough. The kids are going through different types of behavioral and psychiatric therapy and some of it’s at school and some of it is outpatient with medical or behavioral health or mental or behavioral health professionals.
So that stuff all is gonna have to get worked up and brought out and discovery. To get kind of a clear picture of what’s going on there. But again, you’re dealing with young kids who can’t really express themselves in the same way that if you were dealing with a mental anguish, a beneficiary in a wrongful death case, talking about their, their mental pain and suffering and mental anguish, etc.
That in and of itself can be tough when it’s an adult. And now you’ve got five year old kids. So that definitely is a challenge ahead of us for sure.
Chad Sands: How do you see the potential implications for systematic reform? There were no red flags for all three employees? Were they all getting four star reviews and there were no questions about the potential abuse that might be going on from anyone at that CDC Center?
Glen Sturtevant: That’s really kind of the crux of the negligence claim against the government based on how they were running this place and keeping these people employed because you can see in the videos. There’s windows all over the place that are in direct line of sight from people who are in charge, who are in the chain of command, who knew or should have known or had reason to know that something was going on here because it was so it was done so often and right out in the open. It wasn’t just like you had this one bad actor in the room with all these kids. There’s two or three or four additional adults in the room or walking around the hallway. So there was plenty of opportunity for people to see what was going on. They just didn’t say anything about it.
Chad Sands: Did you talk to the families about how they felt about what the sentencing and the punishment they to three people charged?
Glen Sturtevant: They’re not really enthusiastic about one of them only getting two weeks in jail or the other one just getting probation.
I think at the very least, it’ll mean that neither of them are working in a childcare setting again. But, these clients are just good people. They’re all enlisted men. They just want their kids taken care of and their kids have been made worse off as a result of this. And the Navy needs to make good on that commitment. They offered this service.
Chad Sands: Yeah.
Glen Sturtevant: They portrayed it as it was going to be a safe place for their kids to go every day. And it wasn’t and their kids are worse off. And so, the system needs to compensate them for that.
Chad Sands: If there’s video evidence, it feels like they just deny it just to deny it. To just make go away, hoping the families would give up but you guys actually picked up the ball and are going to run with it.
Glen Sturtevant: Could be the case. We’ll never know. That’s certainly not an unreasonable possibility. One of the things that I hold out hope for is the Navy figures — and this is maybe too hopefully — the value of the cases was too high so they have some limits on what they can pay in that administrative phase.
There are higher limits on what could be paid in litigation. So again, me being the plaintiff’s lawyer and maybe thinking “the glass is half full” is that maybe the Navy’s thought process was in order to adequately compensate these folks should be addressed in litigation where there’s more compensation available than the administrative phase.
That would be nice, actually, if that plays
Chad Sands: Do you kind of have hopes on some long term implications or change that can be brought about this?
Glen Sturtevant: Yeah. In the medical malpractice space where we every day represent dozens and dozens of veterans against VA hospitals and military hospitals. One of the things I often hear from clients is, “I want the VA to change as a result of my case.”
Chad Sands: Right.
Glen Sturtevant: And God bless them for feeling that way. And they’re right to feel that way. But the VA federal government Military branches are very, very large bureaucracies. And so, maybe there will be some federal legislation that tries to get at this and help to avoid these sorts of things in the future. I’m not confident that there’s going to be some sort of internal soul searching that gets done on how to do things differently.
Chad Sands: Like that they’ll require to review the videotapes every month for new hires or performance reviews for staff —
Glen Sturtevant: Yep. Common sense would tell you that that makes a whole lot of sense. And as we get into discovery, we’re going to figure out what protocols they did or didn’t have in place. At the same time: bad behavior is bad behavior. And you can’t necessarily change every policy to stop every bad person from doing bad things. And like when you see the video — that should come out in this case — it’s really stark at how obvious and awful it is.
Chad Sands: I bet.
Glen Sturtevant: So whether they could have or should they have caught it earlier? Absolutely. Maybe there will be some procedural change, but I’m not gonna not hold my breath in the meantime.
Chad Sands: What are the next steps of the trial and the time?
Glen Sturtevant: So the cases are filed, they’re being served right now. So we have to serve both the U S attorney general and the U S attorney in Phoenix. Then because it’s the federal government, they get 60 days to file responsive pleadings rather than your normal 30 days to respond. So we will probably get an answer or some other responsive pleading sometime in January or February 2025.
All five cases have been assigned to different judges, which surprised us. I think it would make sense for all five cases to be assigned to one judge. Hopefully that will happen but that’s going to be up to the court, so we’ll see what happens there. But currently we have five separate cases with five separate judges in the same court, all arising out of the same general fact pattern.
Chad Sands: Real quick, I was reading about you leading the Virginia State Bar’s provision of legal services to survivors of natural disasters, mass emergencies, terrorist attacks. Can you talk a little bit about that and what?
Glen Sturtevant: That was back when I was involved in the Young Lawyers Association of the State Bar. I helped get that up and running. It was to provide pro bono legal services. If we had a hurricane in Virginia, and then you had a bunch of contractors from out of state coming in and like price gouging people, you know, “Oh, I’ll fix your roof and give me a down payment,” and then they never come back, that kind of thing. I did that for a few years, although it’s been a while now. So that, that’s a former thing on my resume.
Chad Sands: And when did you start your political career?
Glen Sturtevant: I started out on the school board in the city of Richmond here in Virginia State Capitol. I served a term on the school board, then got elected to the State Senate in 2015, then lost in 2019 and then ran again in 2023 and won.
Chad Sands: Got your seat back.
Glen Sturtevant: Yeah, baby.
