Child Refuses to Corroborate Abuse Story

A 4-year-old girl who is the state’s key witness in a sexual molestation case refused to confirm at a hearing Thursday that the women who operated a day-care home in Cypress had molested her.

“Do you remember what you told your mom?” Francine T. Kammeyer, attorney for the state Department of Social Services, asked the child during the 45-minute hearing.

“No!” the 4-year-old bellowed, laughing into the microphone that had been placed before her.

The mother had testified Wednesday that her daughter had reported being sexually molested at the center.

In an unusual move, Administrative Law Judge Paul M. Hogan ruled earlier this week that the child would not have to testify with those accused present in the hearing room. So Terri Borzoni, 36, watched and listened to the child’s testimony Thursday from a closed room with a TV at the county Social Services Building.

While Kammeyer gently but repeatedly questioned the child about the allegations, the girl either answered “poo-poo no” or “poo-poo yes,” and even the second response was sometimes followed by a “no.” Several times, she mischievously hid under the table and refused to come out.

The only coherent complete answer the child gave was when Kammeyer asked whether Borzoni had ever kissed her.

“She kissed me on my tongue . . . in the bathroom, . . . and I flushed her down the toilet,” the child said.

Minutes later, telling the adults that she was tired of answering their questions, the child ran out of the room laughing, her pink-and-white dress flouncing down the hallway.

Herbert Dodell, Borzoni’s attorney, did not cross-examine the child because, he said, she “did not say anything of importance today. . . . I didn’t want to further distress her.”

In February, the girl’s therapist contacted the Orange County Child Abuse Registry and reported that Borzoni and Vicki Jimenez, 21, allegedly molested the toddler, then 3, while she was attending their day-care.

Borzoni owns the day-care home on Lime Avenue, and Jimenez is her assistant.

The state closed the center and temporarily suspended Borzoni’s license, pending the hearing’s outcome.

Dodell said Thursday that the women are victims of a child’s fantasy and “her mother’s witch hunt.”

“I personally think that this is a child with a very vivid imagination,” he said. “Whatever she said, her mother grabbed on to it and made something out of nothing.”

The child’s mother, whose name along with her daughter’s are being withheld to protect the girl, testified Wednesday that not long after her daughter attended the day-care, she became abnormally sexually aggressive.

The child would often undress and touch herself and would want to be kissed on her tongue, the mother testified.

Her daughter also told her that Borzoni and Jimenez had fondled her and had put pencils into her vagina, the mother testified.