A Mobile County daycare worker has been arrested and charged with child abuse after court documents accused her of lifting a young child off the floor by the arm and dropping or slamming them onto the ground.
Rossilynn Harris, 70, was arrested by the Mobile County Sheriff’s Office on one count of child abuse tied to an incident authorities say occurred June 4, 2026. According to court documents, Harris lifted the child several inches off the floor by one arm before dropping or slamming the child onto their rear end.
The same court documents allege Harris also “violently positioned the child in a chair” and “aggressively pushed” the child into a table during the same incident. The allegations emerged through court records rather than a police news release, and it is not clear from those records how the incident first came to the attention of investigators.
Harris was arrested on Tuesday, July 14, and was released a short time later, according to jail records. It is not yet clear whether Harris has entered a plea or whether the daycare facility where she worked has taken any employment action in response to the arrest.
Cases involving licensed childcare workers accused of physical abuse typically draw scrutiny not only from law enforcement but from state licensing regulators, who can separately investigate whether a facility’s staffing and supervision practices played a role — a process that, if it occurs here, would run alongside any criminal proceedings against Harris.