Nurse fired after father films newborn slammed in Suffolk hospital NICU
A Good Samaritan NICU nurse was fired hours after a father filmed his 2-day-old son being slammed into a bassinet, and the case later fell apart in court.
A Suffolk County hospital case that began with a father’s cellphone video ended with a fired nurse, a police investigation and a criminal charge that was later dropped. The episode, tied to Good Samaritan University Hospital in West Islip, has put patient safety and oversight in the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit under a harsh local spotlight.
The incident happened on Feb. 6, 2023, when a newborn just two days old was being cared for in the NICU at 1000 Montauk Highway. The father said he recorded what happened through a nursery window on his cellphone, then showed the video to hospital staff. The baby’s mother also confronted the nurse after seeing the recording.
Court filings and later reports identified the nurse as Amanda Burke, a 29-year-old registered nurse from Holbrook who was working in the NICU at the time. Suffolk County prosecutors said Good Samaritan terminated Burke’s employment within hours of the incident, before Suffolk County Police opened a formal investigation through the department’s Special Victims Unit.
Prosecutors charged Burke with endangering the welfare of a child, a Class A misdemeanor. The Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office later said the case moved forward until it was set to go to trial, then ended on March 25, 2024, when prosecutors dropped the criminal case. The district attorney’s office said the New York State Department of Licensing concluded Burke did not act with gross negligence.
The baby survived and was reported to be doing OK after the incident, a critical fact for a case that could have ended far worse. But the criminal dismissal did not erase the central questions now facing parents who trust Suffolk hospitals with their most vulnerable newborns: how closely staff in the NICU are supervised, how quickly concerns are escalated, and what safeguards are in place when a family says something looks wrong.
Burke’s attorney later said she kept her nursing license and was still working as a registered nurse after the case was dismissed. For Good Samaritan, the matter has become more than a staffing decision. It is a test of whether one employee’s conduct, if that is what the evidence ultimately shows, can be isolated from broader questions about accountability inside a Suffolk County maternity ward that parents expect to be among the most closely monitored places in the hospital.
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