A 10-month-old baby girl is currently at Children's Hospital getting treatment after a headstone fell on her at a Detroit cemetery. Jessica McFadden and her family visited Gethsemane Cemetery to pay respects to her grandmother on Mother's Day.
Disaster struck, though, when she placed her daughter, Melani, in front of the headstone for a picture, as it suddenly fell on the baby while being photographed. McFadden was emotional when recalling the incident, telling Fox 2 Detroit that the headstone was not properly placed, and she did not know if her baby was alive under there. McFadden added that she could not hear her baby or see her.
When Jessica got the stone off of Melani, she saw that her baby girl was hurt. McFadden said that Melani had a huge knot, and it was bleeding on the back of her head. At that moment, her daughter started vomiting, and she went out.
Melani diagnosed with a fractured skull after the accident
According to MLive, Melani was rushed to the hospital, where the young child was diagnosed with a fractured skull. Melani's father, Jeremy McFadden, can't hide his displeasure with the accident, saying he is furious that this happened to his baby and he wasn't there to do anything about it.
The McFaddens hired Attorney Jonathan Marko to represent the family in the case. Marko said that in addition to the headstone not being properly installed, the cemetery is also not properly maintained because of short staffing.
According to Marko, it is not like lightning struck, and this tombstone suddenly fell on Melani. Marko said that this tombstone was a disaster waiting to happen. He added that they have preliminary information that the cemetery had to cut back on what they were able to do because of the staffing shortages.
Marko said this happens when they cut funding and put a bare-bones operation in their public services; they do not operate the way they are supposed to. The McFadden family said it appeared other headstones in the cemetery had also fallen over.
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McFaddens want justice for what happened to baby Melani
The City of Detroit, which owns the cemetery, provided a statement about the incident, saying that third-party companies hired by individual families install headstones and the cemetery operator has no record of any concerns about this specific headstone being in danger of falling, nor had it fallen and been previously reset.
According to the McFadden family, the headstone was installed about five years ago, and they are working to confirm who installed it. Jessica said this could have been prevented had the headstone been properly placed and adequately kept or whatever could've been done.
Fortunately for them, baby Melani avoided death in the accident. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than 7,000 teens and children in the 0-19 age bracket died because of unintentional injuries in 2019.
