A woman cleared of child abuse charges after bringing a glue gun to school says no one will hire her.
Lizandra Cosme was fired after five children suffered marks on their skin. She says she admitted her mistake, but it should not keep her from returning to the classroom.
“I thought with my acquittal everything was going to come back to normal,” she told NBC 5 in an interview Wednesday.
Cosme says a video helped clear her of the charges, but it has not gotten her name off of a certain "list" keeping her from getting a job in child care.
“I am still indicated under the system, which I don’t understand why," she said. "The indication is child abuse and that is not what I did that day in the classroom."
Cosme says the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services placed her on what is called an indicated list of child abusers, after Cosme had been accused criminally of burning children with the glue gun.
“I decided to show them that the glue stick I was using once put on the glue dispenser becomes stringy, that’s exactly what they were so mesmerized by,” she said.
Cosme’s attorney, Francis Baumgart, says security video from that day shows that the children had been not been upset by the activity and that video also helped the jury find her not guilty.
But he says DCFS never watched the video before they put his client’s name on that list.
“The jury nine months later watched it (and) said there was nothing on there whatsoever to indicate an intentional act of any kind,” Baumgart said.
Even though Cosme has been acquitted, she says can not apply for another daycare job as long as she remains on that list.
Baumgart has been fighting to get her off of it.
“It’s beyond absurd it is basically unfair, that’s what it is," he said.
DCFS issued a statement saying it's closed the case with an "indicated finding" meaning substantiation of the allegation of abuse through burns. The legal requirements and evidence in a criminal case are different in several ways from a DCFS child-protection investigation, and one is not dependent on the other.
Organizations that do background checks would still be notified of the "indicated finding."
