School had been in session at Mount Lookout Elementary for only a few weeks when Raylee Browning, a kindergartner with bright-blue eyes, arrived one morning in a wheelchair. Her family said she’d had a temper tantrum and kicked a wall, fracturing her femur. The explanation struck Carrie Ciliberti, Raylee’s gym teacher, as strange. Ciliberti knew that the femur is one of the strongest bones in the body, difficult to break. If you kick a wall hard enough to fracture your femur, wouldn’t you also break your foot? she wondered.
Ciliberti, who had been teaching for 34 years, knew Raylee to be a sweet child who loved to talk about becoming a princess. She never acted out, though she tended to vie for Ciliberti’s attention more than most other students did. Ciliberti noticed that Raylee didn’t play much with the other kids at school. And she often wore clothing that didn’t fit her well or that wasn’t right for the season, like long pants and long sleeves in the sticky August heat. At the end of the day, while waiting to be picked up, Raylee would “put her arms around my waist and lock her legs around my legs,” Ciliberti later testified in court. She “would say, ‘I love you. Could you be my mommy?’”
