The Camera Told the Story Kinder Kids Would Not: A Los Angeles Mother Sues After Her 4-Year-Old Was Pinned and Carried Upside Down

Brie’ann Battle did not get a phone call from Kinder Kids Christian Preschool on the day a worker put hands on her 4-year-old son. She got a recording, later, from an employee who decided a parent should see what the classroom camera had already stored. The clip is dated March 14, 2024. It was shot inside the Mid-Wilshire center at 5353 West Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles. ABC7 aired it on April 26. By then the boy had been out of a school he had attended since he was about 18 months old, and his mother had already filed a child-abuse report with the Los Angeles Police Department.

The footage is short and hard to misread. The child is on the floor. A woman grabs his arms and pins him while other children are in the room. She then takes him by the ankles and carries him upside down to a table. Battle told Eyewitness News she was distraught. “Nobody wants to see their child being manhandled like that at all.” She said the owner never told her. An employee did. When Battle asked for a meeting, she said the owner-operator played a different clip, one from the foyer, in which the boy was “giving her a lot of activity,” as if a later moment of a child being loud could erase the earlier one. “How dare you?” Battle said. “And then she’s avoiding accountability, so it’s turned very criminal.”

ABC7 said it spoke with the employee in the video and that she had resigned. The station said the preschool did not comment. Battle, relying on what she saw and who she believed was in the frame, has identified the worker as Artea Kirkland, a licensee of the center. That identification is her allegation. It is not a criminal finding, and no prosecutor has stood up in open court and said so. What the tape itself shows does not depend on the name. A small child was restrained on the floor and then dangled by the ankles in a room licensed to care for children. Battle said her son later bruised. She pulled him out.

A License That Outlasted the Video

Kinder Kids Christian Preschool is not a pop-up. Public licensing records list facility number 197416529, a child-care center first licensed by the California Department of Social Services on October 14, 2009, with a listed capacity of 67. The licensee names on file are Michelle Moore and Artea Kirkland. The listed administrator is Brenda Smith. Directories that track the Community Care Licensing Division still showed the center as licensed well after the video circulated, including a recorded visit on September 27, 2024. Those same profiles list complaint-related visits and citations, among them a rule requiring that child care be provided in a safe and healthful manner.

California’s child-care rules are not ambiguous about bodies. Licensed centers are forbidden from using corporal punishment. Staff are supposed to supervise, not hoist a preschooler by the ankles because he is difficult. A resignation answers a personnel question. It does not answer a licensing question, and it does not answer a parent who watched the state’s substitute for trust, a ceiling camera, do the job the front desk would not. Battle asked that the license be pulled. “She doesn’t need to be taken care of anybody else’s kids, and her license needs to be revoked,” she told ABC7. “She needs to go to jail for this.” As of the public directories still posting that license, the number attached to that Pico Boulevard address had not been reported as revoked.

That gap is the story that outlived the local newscast. A parent can file a police report on a Friday and still drop a younger sibling’s classmate off at the same door on Monday if the state has not moved. Community Care Licensing has a complaint line and a citation system built for missing paperwork, blocked fire exits, and staff-to-child ratios. A video of a child carried upside down ought to sit at the top of that stack. Whether it did is not something the department has explained in the coverage that followed. The center’s side of the record, in public, is silence plus a resignation.

The Lawsuit That Reached a Trial Date

Battle did not wait on the license. On April 23, 2024, she sued in Los Angeles County Superior Court, for herself and as guardian ad litem for her son, identified in the caption as C.B.M. The case is 24STCV10212, Brie’ann Battle v. Kinder Kids Christian Development Center, assigned to Judge Maurice A. Leiter at the Stanley Mosk Courthouse. The complaint names the center and Artea Kirkland. Court summaries describe it as an intentional-tort case, the category that covers assault and battery. Battle’s claims, as laid out by her lawyers and in the filings that followed, include assault, battery, negligence, and breach of fiduciary duty, along with a claim under California’s Ralph Civil Rights Act, which is supposed to protect people from violence or intimidation because of a protected characteristic. She has sought more than $100,000, medical costs, and punitive damages. A judge signed the guardian-ad-litem order on May 23, 2024. The defendants posted jury fees.

The defense did not concede the calendar. On October 23, 2025, Judge Leiter granted an ex parte application by Kinder Kids and Kirkland to continue the trial. The new setting was an eight-day jury trial starting April 6, 2026, at 9:30 a.m. in Department 54, 111 North Hill Street, with a final status conference on March 27, 2026. A docket snapshot pulled from the superior court in January 2026 still showed those dates. Major local outlets have not reported a verdict or a public settlement since. That is not the same thing as a case vanishing. It means the public record a parent can read without a courthouse login stops at a trial date, while the video that started the case is still online.

Civil court and criminal court are doing different jobs here, and it is worth keeping them apart. A lawsuit asks whether the center and the people who run it owe this child money and a finding. A criminal case would ask whether someone should be jailed. Battle reported the March 14 handling as child abuse. LAPD has not, in any subsequent public statement that local news has carried, announced a filing. A resignation can shrink a workplace problem until it looks like it has been handled. It does not shrink the elements of battery if a jury is eventually seated. Nor does it answer the children who were in the room and are not plaintiffs.

What a Camera Is For

Preschool cameras are sold to parents as safety. In practice they are often a private archive until a parent, or a whistleblowing employee, forces the file into daylight. Battle’s account is that the official version on offer was a different angle, a boy being “active,” chosen because it flattered the adult. That is a familiar move in institutions that take care of people who cannot write their own complaint. The AEGIS Alliance has tracked the same instinct in larger buildings. The New Orleans archdiocese’s clergy-abuse files, the $305 million settlement, and the archbishop’s exit were also a story about records that existed and were not handed to the people who needed them. A different kind of school failure, a teenager’s death after a vape-pen arrest and expulsion, is in the lawsuit his family filed against a school and a sheriff’s office. The through-line is not the offense. It is the first response: manage the parent, not the harm.

There is a narrower lesson on Pico Boulevard. A center can be licensed for 67 children, carry a Christian name on the sign, and still leave a 4-year-old’s mother to discover a takedown from a coworker. Title 22 and the Health and Safety Code give the state the vocabulary to call that unsafe. Vocabulary is not a revocation. Until a judge or a licensing deputy writes something harder than a continuance, the public fact pattern is the one the camera already settled: arms, floor, ankles, table, and a mother who had to sue to get a straight answer.

Battle has been clear about what she wants, which is not a softer edit. She wants the license gone, a criminal look at the cover story she says she was offered, and a civil judgment that tells the next parent the tape is enough. Whether Department 54 ever swore a jury, or the parties folded the case in a hallway, is not in the news accounts that followed the October 2025 continuance. The video is. So is the address. So is the license number that, in the directories, kept saying licensed.

More of this beat is on The AEGIS Alliance’s Crime News and US News desks, and in the older reporting on how institutions bury abuse until a camera or a leak forces it out.