A 23-year-old German woman has been charged with assaulting a child she was a nanny for in Massachusetts, officials confirm.
Mareike Arbeiter, who currently lives in Sherborn, was arraigned Thursday in Framingham District Court on one count of assault and battery on a child causing an injury, according to the Middlesex County District Attorney's Office.
Prosecutors say they have a nanny cam video of the assault.
Arbeiter was held on $2,000 bail with the condition that she not have any unsupervised contact with children under 18 and that she not contact the alleged victim or the family, the D.A's Office said.
Her next court date is Jan. 5.
Her court-appointed lawyer, Mark Wester, says Arbeiter has been in the U.S. since October and was working for a family through the U.S. State Department-approved American Institute for Foreign Study Inc. program.
Wester said Arbeiter was also taking care of the family's 1-year-old girl.
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Arbeiter's attorney also said there was no apparent or visible injury to the child, but that they would follow up to see if an injury appeared.
Wester added he has ordered a German translator for his client's next court date; although Arbeiter speaks English, he said she doesn't have the confidence of understanding it well enough to follow court terminology.
Neighbors say they're upset about the allegations.
"This is a very quiet neighborhood. Everybody is nice, you know," Ming Chen, a neighbor, said. "I'm surprised to hear about what happened in this area."
On Friday, Au Pair in America, which is owned by the American Institute for Foreign Study, released a statement on the case.
"We take any such allegations very seriously, and we have launched an investigation into this issue. We do not comment on pending investigations," it read.
