Mother-daughter daycare team sentenced to prison in children’s pool drownings in San Jose

SAN JOSE — After heart-wrenching declarations from shattered families, a San Jose mother-daughter daycare team was sentenced to prison Friday for their convictions in the deaths of two toddlers who drowned in a backyard pool at the mother’s Almaden home three years ago.

Nina Fathizadeh, 43, was issued a 13-year, four month term and Shahin Gheblehshenas, 67, was issued an eight-year term by Santa Clara County Judge Paul Bernal, capping a prosecution in which Fathizadeh pleaded guilty in February, followed by her mother going to trial and being found guilty by a jury March 24.

They were each convicted of three felony child endangerment charges related to the Oct. 2, 2023 tragedy in which two children drowned and a third nearly drowned. Fathizadeh was also convicted of seven more child endangerment counts related to separate allegations of transporting children in a vehicle without properly restraining them.

Both defendants appeared in Bernal’s courtroom clad in orange jail clothing as several people, including the father of drowning victim 16-month-old Lillian “Lily” Hanan, of San Jose, and relatives of victim 18-month-old Payton Cobb, of Hollister, and family members of the defendants, gave victim impact statements to the judge.

Bernal’s sentences generally fell in the middle range of what he was legally authorized to hand out, and factored the lack of criminal history for both defendants, who will get roughly a half-year of credit for the jail time they have already served.

However, the difference in sentencing length was not strictly a product of the additional counts charged to Fathizadeh. Gheblehshenas was not home when the drownings occurred, and received less prison time for the same three core charges as her daughter.

“It is a catastrophe for everybody,” Bernal said before revealing the sentences. “I can’t bring back Lily and Payton. Nobody can.”

The statements made in court Friday pitted the victims’ families offering painful detail about their losses against the defendants’ relatives pleading for mercy.

Lily’s father, Scott Hanan, described the difficult journey he and his wife Josephine endured in having a family, which included 15 years of fertility struggles before they adopted Lily. He described her loves, including the song “Baby Beluga,” and how the child was buried in a beluga costume they had planned for her to wear for the coming Halloween before she died.

“Losing Lily was not only a loss for us, but also a loss for her birth family,” Hanan said. “Our home still has a silence that should never exist … Part of us is just waiting for her to come home.”

Hanan also rejected the defendants’ assertions that the tragedy resulted from a “momentary lapse.”

“She put protecting herself ahead of doing everything possible to save those babies,” he said of Fathizadeh. “These were not harmless oversights.”

Hanan described how the word “happy” has been forever distorted for him in light of the defendants’ business name, Happy Happy Daycare.

“It really damaged the words ‘happy’ and ‘happily ever after.’ Whenever we hear the word ‘happy,’ we think of the place where Lily was killed,” he said. “This sentence matters because Lily mattered. Every parent who leaves their child at daycare should be able to trust that child will come home.”

Deborah Herting, Payton’s grandmother, echoed Hanan’s feeling that the defendants were not remorseful in relation to the gravity of the deaths.

“There’s no worse sound in the world than hearing your daughter say goodbye to her daughter for the last time. The sound of her grief and her pain was so deep, and so real, that it will never ever leave my head. It’s there forever,” she said. “They still don’t get it. All I’ve seen is they’re worried about themselves.”

“Nobody in my family will ever trust again. It doesn’t matter how long they go to prison, they are never going to know what we feel like, ever,” Herting added. “They have to be held accountable.”

For the first time since the deaths, Fathizadeh and Gheblehshenas spoke directly to the victims’ families as they sought leniency from the judge.

Fathizadeh voiced remorse and regret, and proclaimed her love for the children who died.

“There is no word I even can (say) … or feel what you have been through,” Fathizadeh said, while trembling and crying. “I miss them more than you can think, but that’s nothing than what has happened to you.”

On the morning of the drownings, Lily and Payton made their way into the pool at the daycare operated at Gheblehshenas’ Fleetwood Drive home and drowned. A third child was also found in the pool but survived.

Fathizadeh described being overwhelmed by panic at the sight of the surviving child floating in the pool and believing that the two girls were playing, not also in the pool.

“My life will never be the same, in custody or out of custody, they will still be with me,” Fathizadeh said. “My sadness and remorse are not going to change.”

Her brother, Sina Fathizadeh, who also spoke Friday, backed that claim, describing how he did not see the girls in the water until after pulling up the pool cover. He pleaded to the judge not to mistake the chaos and confusion after the drownings for willful inaction. Rahim Fathizadeh, Gheblehshenas’ husband and Nina’s father, also pleaded for compassion in light of a terminal cancer diagnosis that leaves him with months to live.

Gheblehshenas said that “I have no excuse for what happened” and asked Bernal to “not judge me as the person who made a big mistake in my life, but see me as a human who is truly broken, remorseful, and full of sorrow.”

Throughout the case, prosecutors asserted that Nina Fathizadeh failed to ensure the pool’s safety gate was closed before allowing the children into the backyard. A 5-foot fence surrounding the pool was propped open, and the criminal charges alleged both women knew Rahim Fathizadeh would periodically open the gate to water plants and forget to close it.

They further alleged Nina Fathizadeh could see the open pool gate when she let the two girls and a boy into the backyard but did not close it before returning to the kitchen to tend to oatmeal cooking on the stove.

She was out of view of the children for at least five minutes, according to a San Jose police affidavit. Fathizadeh later found the boy floating in the shallow end of the pool, pulled him out, called 911 and began CPR. She then alerted her brother, who was the one to find the two girls in the deep end of the pool, according to police. The girls later died at a hospital.

Gheblehshenas was not home when the children entered the unsecured backyard pool. But suspicions of negligence surfaced after investigators determined that she went to a medical appointment despite a daycare employee calling in sick and her daughter raising concerns about supervising four children alone. Parents were not informed about the short staffing when they dropped off their children.

Even after she learned her appointment was actually scheduled for the following week, investigators say Gheblehshenas opted not to return home to relieve her daughter but instead headed to a separate nascent and unlicensed day care also run by the family.

“The care of small children – our own and others – comes with deep responsibility and requires close attention,” District Attorney Jeff Rosen said in a statement after the sentencing. “This case tragically shows the difference between proper care and criminal negligence.”

As he was sentencing Nina Fathizadeh, Bernal also pushed back on the notion that the deaths resulted from a momentary lapse, as she, her attorneys and family contended.

“The defendant did not simply tend to oatmeal, (and) that led to the death of these children,” the judge said. “There were several data points over many months if not years that led to these unfortunate deaths.”

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.