A former Florida school principal is facing charges after a second grandchild died while in her care, police say.
According to ABC Action News, 65-year-old Tracey Nix is facing aggravated manslaughter charges after her 11-month-old granddaughter, Uriel Schock (pictured left), was found deceased in a hot vehicle on November 1, 2022. The incident happened at Nix’s home in Wauchula when temperatures that day reached 90s degrees.
A Hardee County Sheriff’s Office complaint affidavit indicated that Nix was practicing piano while Uriel passed away inside a Lexus SUV, parked in the front yard with its windows rolled up. When one of Nix’s grandsons arrived, she claimed she”all of a sudden”realized the infant was still in the vehicle.
The defendant’s husband, Nun Ney Nix, retrieved Uriel from the vehicle and began CPR.
Nix was babysitting Uriel on the day in question while the baby’s mother was out getting her hair done. Uriel’s parents, Kaila and Drew Schock, spoke to ABC Action News I-Team following the incident.
“And that it actually just f—ing happened twice. In our lifetime,” Drew said.
Uriel’s 1-year-old brother, Ezra (pictured right), was in Nix’s care in 2021, three days before Christmas, when he drowned in a nearby pond. Kaila said she rushed to Nix’s home after Drew got a call that “something” happened to her son.
“I could see the helicopter landing,” Kaila said. “I didn’t look. When there was a stop sign,” adding that she was driving so fast to the scene that she got into a head-on collision with another driver.
“All of my airbags went off, I don’t remember how I got out, but I got out and started running to my parent’s house and at this point, I don’t have shoes. I’m just running. That was my desperation to get to my son.”
Kaila said she never looked at the incident report on the boy’s death, after investigators “withheld information from me, per my request, per my doctor’s advice, that any information that would work me up or make me emotionally distressful would be harmful to my unborn child.”
“I was told unless I believed that my mom held my son’s head under the water and intentionally killed him, that there is nothing else that they can do about my son’s death,” Kaila said.
Kaila was pregnant with Uriel at the time and only knew that Nix said she fell asleep when Ezra wandered to the pond.
The incident report states that Nix said she was on a sofa while her husband “was rocking” Ezra in a recliner. Mr. Nix said the baby fell asleep on the recliner and he left the child with his wife, who was awake on the sofa, to go run errands.
Ezra Schock Incident Report by Leigh Egan
Tracey Nix later told police that she drifted off to sleep unintentionally and Ezra wandered away. She said she woke up and drove around trying to find her grandson, and located him in a “large pond stocked with ducks on the west side of the property.”
Kaila didn’t “trust [Tracey Nix] at all” after the incident, but eventually decided that she loved her mother and wanted her to be a part of Uriel’s life.
“We were anxious, but I loved my mother and I am a daughter that wanted her mom in her life in some capacity, and in that moment, I thought that I could believe in second chances.”
The second chance involved the defendant watching Uriel while supervised, which didn’t produce any red flags. Then, Kaila decided to allow her mother to babysit Uriel. Within hours, police arrived to tell her that Uriel was dead.
“You couldn’t fathom it happening twice,” Drew said. “Somebody has to answer for that.”
Tracey Nix, a former principal in Hardee County, could face between 12 to 30 years in prison if convicted.
“Because somebody dies doesn’t necessarily mean that somebody has to pay,” Nix’s lawyer, William Fletcher, said. “This obviously was an accident and the question was — is it culpable negligence?”
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[Feature Photo: Uriel (left) & Ezra/Handout; Robarts Family Funeral Home]
