In the first week of January 2025, several news outlets reported that a nurse in Virginia had been arrested on charges of malicious wounding and felony child abuse after several babies in her hospital's neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) suffered "unexplainable fractures."
Over the following days, rumors circulating on social media sites like X and Reddit alleged the attacks specifically targeted Black infants.
While it's true a nurse was arrested and charged for one of the attacks, however, not all the victims were Black infants.
A Jan. 7, 2025, news release from police in Henrico County, Virginia, stated that while they were unable to release specific details for privacy reasons, the babies were not targeted based on their race. Dominique Hackey, a parent of one of the victims, also said in interviews with CNN and Fox News that two of the seven victims were Black and that the victims were not targeted by race. Additionally, the nurse was not charged with a hate crime, as might be expected if the attacks were motivated by racism.
According to reporting from The Washington Post, four different infants in a Henrico Doctors' Hospital NICU suffered from mysterious injuries in the summer of 2023. While both the hospital and police opened investigations into what caused the injuries, neither could come to a solid conclusion — the hospital theorized the injuries could have come from an overly rough injection, while the police suspected abuse but could not identify a suspect.
In late 2024, however, three more babies suffered broken bones, causing the hospital to release a statement saying it would not admit newborns into the NICU until it could determine the causes of the fractures.
The police were able to find a suspect, however. Twenty-six-year-old Erin Elizabeth Ann Strotman was arrested and charged in connection with an "ongoing investigation involving a Henrico Doctors' Hospital's Neonatal Intensive Care Unit," according to a news release issued by Henrico County Police. That news release also stated that police were reopening investigations into all of the 2023 and 2024 cases.