Woman Charged After Filming Herself Pouring Water on Sleeping Baby

Source: Karunyapas Krueklad / EyeEm / Getty

Woman Films Herself Pouring Water On A Sleeping Child

A video posted on Facebook raised a lot of eyebrows for those who saw it a few days back.

The footage captures a woman laughing while pouring water on a 9-month-old girl asleep in her crib. The infant starts coughing until just seconds later, when another splash of water pours on the child’s nose and leads to both more coughs and some crying.

“Payback for waking me up all kinda times of [the] night,” 33-year-old Caitlin Alyse Hardy wrote in a post that accompanied said video as she posted to her Facebook page. This is all according to the information the Sumter County, South Carolina, Sheriff Anthony Dennis tells PEOPLE.

Several people who spotted the video once it went up alerted the sheriff’s office with their concerns, sending the link to the office’s website and to the sheriff personally, he recalls. “I didn’t think it was real at first,” he explained. When questioned, the suspect told investigators “she was joking or playing a game with the baby.”

“We didn’t take it as a joke or some type of game she was playing with a 9-month-old,” he says. “We wanted to make sure the child was okay. Luckily, the child was okay, but on Wednesday, authorities arrested Hardy on a charge of cruelty to children for the January 29 incident.

“Hardy did pour a bottle of water on a 9-month-old female infant while the infant was sleeping,” the police department’s statement alleges. “After being poured with water the second time, the infant woke up coughing. Hardy video recorded the incident and posted it on her Facebook page.”

Hardy was booked and released from jail on Wednesday after posting a $1,500 bond, according to reports from TV station WIS in Columbia.