Fayetteville mother demands tougher charges after daughter drowns at unlicensed day care

A Fayetteville mother is asking prosecutors to file more serious charges against a day care owner after her 1-year-old daughter drowned at the facility this past September.

Gigi Michelle James died at Mema’s Playhouse in Fayetteville after slipping into a fenced-off pool. Her mother, Ginger Calder, said she trusted the daycare’s owner, 51-year-old Melissa Ortiz-Fikes, who claimed to have a background in nursing and early childhood education experience. A WRAL investigation found no record of Ortiz-Fikes ever having a nursing license.

Calder said she initially found Mema’s Playhouse online.

“She had tons of great reviews. So, I went to meet and greet to talk to her,” Calder said. “She was so warming…comforting.”

During her visit, Calder noticed a pool in the backyard of Ortiz-Fikes’ Fayetteville home. Calder said she was reassured by the fencing around it and by Ortiz-Fikes’s claims of professional qualifications.

But just a month later, tragedy struck.

Under Ortiz-Fikes’ care, Gigi slipped past the fence and went into backyard pool, allegedly while workers were preoccupied with other children. She was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.

“I’m breaking every moment,” Calder said of her daughter’s death.

WRAL Investigates found that the owner of Mema’s Playhouse was illegally operating a day care out of her Fayetteville home.

To check and see if a daycare is licensed, you can go to the NCDHHS website.

State law allows no more than 10 children to be at an in-home daycare, yet Calder reportedly had more than 26 around the time of the incident, according to police.

Despite the lack of a license and the drowning, Ortiz-Fikes continued running the daycare for three more days after Gigi’s death, before being shutdown.

Twenty-seven days after the incident, Ortiz-Fikes was arrested for operating an unlicensed daycare, but Calder believes more serious charges are appropriate.

“They are not saying it’s accidental yet because they don’t have the autopsy, but they’re not ruling this as a child neglect or manslaughter, nothing like that yet and… they absolutely should,” she said.

When WRAL asked Fayetteville police if more serious charges were coming, a department spokesperson replied that detectives were “still actively working some areas of this case,” and would announce any additional charges.

Calder said the pain of losing Gigi is something she will carry forever.