The foundational crack in Carla’s hastily constructed narrative appeared before the police even set foot on the property. While Carla insisted her facility was empty, the licensing supervisor had already been in direct contact with a mother who confirmed, without a shadow of a doubt, that she had dropped her toddler off at Play Mountain Place earlier that very morning. The child, born in 2017, was a mere two years old—far too young to leave the premises on their own accord, and certainly too young to be invisible. Officer Landon, arriving on the scene as the first responding officer, was immediately thrust into a bizarre puzzle. She was met by two licensing officials who briefed her on the glaring contradiction. The officers found themselves standing outside a seemingly tranquil home, armed with the unsettling knowledge that a toddler had entered the building and, according to the owner, simply ceased to exist.
What followed was a masterclass in obfuscation, executed by a woman who seemed to believe she could outsmart the police with the kind of transparent lies usually reserved for schoolyard mischief. Carla Marie Faith did not immediately answer the door. Instead, in a display of comedic evasion, she attempted to slip out the back alley. A licensing official observed her re-entering the property, prompting Officer Landon to intercept the bizarre maneuvering. Carla had allegedly tried to claim she didn’t drive a Jeep that was parked nearby, attempting to physically distance herself from her own property. A moment later, a black Camaro cruised past the house, adding another layer of chaotic misdirection to the scene. Officer Landon, sharp and unyielding, began to piece together the chaotic movements. She intercepted a man named Mark Spain in the alleyway. Mark identified himself as Carla’s employee and claimed he had just dropped her off after a quick trip to the bank. When pressed by the officer about the whereabouts of the children, Mark effortlessly parroted the company line: he didn’t think she had any kids that day. When asked where the kids might be if they weren’t at the daycare, Mark offered the very address they were currently standing at. The circular logic was dizzying. Officer Landon, maintaining a terrifyingly calm and professional demeanor, politely informed Mark that leaving toddlers completely unattended was a severe problem. She asked him not to tip Carla off, though the network of deception was already rapidly communicating behind the scenes.
The arrival of Christina “Chrissy” Swager added yet another character to this theater of the absurd. Chrissy approached the property and introduced herself to Officer Landon not as an employee, but merely as a “friend” of Carla’s. She played the part of the bewildered bystander with theatrical innocence, claiming she had just ducked out to grab some lunch. It was an impressive performance, utterly devoid of truth. Later investigations would reveal that Chrissy was, in fact, an active employee at the daycare, deeply entrenched in the daily operations and fully complicit in the unfolding cover-up. As Officer Landon navigated this barrage of misdirection, the sheer volume of false and misleading information being hurled at law enforcement was staggering. Carla’s lies were not just grounds for adverse licensing action; they were rapidly escalating the situation from a civil inquiry into a frantic, high-stakes search and rescue operation. If a mother dropped her child off, she expected that child to remain at that location. The horrifying alternative—that the children had been carted off to an undisclosed secondary location or abandoned inside the house—hung heavy in the crisp Colorado air.
Finally coming face-to-face with Officer Landon, Carla Marie Faith attempted to project an aura of bewildered innocence. She offered the officer water, smiled warmly, and played the gracious host whose afternoon had been inexplicably interrupted by state authorities. When Officer Landon firmly laid out the concerns—the welfare of the children, the unreturned knocks, the bizarre fence-hopping, and the mother’s confirmation of a drop-off—Carla continued to stonewall. She claimed she didn’t have her gate opener and had just returned to the property. She brazenly maintained that there were no children inside. Officer Landon, bound by the constitutional constraints of the Fourth Amendment, could not simply kick the doors down without probable cause. Mere suspicion, no matter how glaring, was not enough to breach the threshold of a private residence. They needed irrefutable evidence. They needed a sound. They needed a slip-up.
The slip-up came in the form of backpacks. During a consensual perimeter search of the property, which included a secondary rented house owned by Carla, Officer Landon stumbled upon a massive pile of children’s belongings stashed unceremoniously under some blankets. It wasn’t just one or two bags; it was a mountain of them. Diaper bags, tiny backpacks, thirteen or fourteen in total, stacked in a way that screamed of a panicked, last-minute concealment. When confronted with this glaring physical evidence, Carla’s improvisational skills were pushed to their absolute limits, resulting in a lie so spectacular it bordered on satire. She looked the police officer in the eye and claimed that she was simply collecting and cleaning all of these backpacks for a local soccer team. It was a defense so inherently ridiculous—cleaning a dozen toddler-sized diaper bags for a sports team on a Wednesday afternoon—that the officers barely needed to process it before dismissing it entirely. The tension escalated. The officers were no longer dealing with a simple code violation; they were dealing with a woman who was actively and aggressively hiding an unknown number of vulnerable children.
As the officers meticulously documented the backpacks, attempting to pull phone numbers from luggage tags to contact terrified parents, the sensory environment of the house began to betray its owner. Faintly, but unmistakably, the cheerful, tinny sound of children’s music drifted through the floorboards. It was coming from below. When asked about the music, Carla deployed her next incredible defense: the house did not have a basement. She stood on the very floorboards vibrating with nursery rhymes and denied the existence of a subterranean level with the conviction of a flat-earther denying gravity. Officer Landon, an expert in reading human behavior, noted that Carla was sweating, pacing, and texting frantically on her phone. And then, as if by dark magic, the moment the police explicitly mentioned the muffled music, the cheerful tunes abruptly ceased. The silence that followed was deafening. It was the undeniable sound of active obstruction. Carla had texted someone below to cut the audio.
Officer Parker, who had arrived to provide backup and to ensure Carla and Chrissy didn’t wander off, kept a close, scrutinizing eye on the women. His patience was wearing dangerously thin. The cat-and-mouse game had lost its administrative politeness; it was now a tense standoff. Parker bluntly asked Carla how to get into the basement. Carla, doubling down on her architectural gaslighting, apologized profusely and reiterated that a basement simply did not exist. She suggested the kids might be at the park. She offered every conceivable alternative reality except the truth. But police officers are not deterred by locked doors, and they certainly aren’t deterred by invisible ones.
The tipping point—the moment that transformed the scene from a bizarre standoff into a rescue mission—was a sound that cuts through any lie: the unmistakable, muffled cry of a young child. It emanated from the floorboards, a brief, desperate wail that echoed for only a few seconds before being hushed. It was the probable cause they needed. It was the undeniable proof of life. Officer Parker and Officer Landon intensified their search of the interior, moving past the pile of “soccer team” backpacks, past the sweating, stammering owner, and zeroed in on a completely unassuming wall.
What they discovered was a piece of carpentry designed for pure, unadulterated deception. A false wall, expertly disguised to look like a standard architectural fixture, concealed a small, secret doorway. It was a hidden portal leading into the dark. As the officers breached the secret door and descended the narrow, makeshift stairs, they were hit by a visceral wall of sensory horror. The smell of soil, dampness, and dozens of heavily soiled diapers assaulted their nostrils. The basement was not a finished, safe play area; it was a cramped, poorly ventilated subterranean bunker.
As the officers shone their flashlights into the gloom, the sheer scale of Carla Marie Faith’s deception was finally laid bare. Huddled together in the dim light were not just the two children her license permitted. There were not even the six she claimed were at the park. Stacked shoulder-to-shoulder in the claustrophobic space were twenty-five toddlers and infants. Twenty-five missing children, quietly terrified, sitting in the dark, breathing stale air.
Standing among this sea of hidden toddlers was an adult woman, desperately trying to maintain the silence Carla had commanded via text message. Officer Landon, her voice a mixture of righteous fury and professional command, immediately detained the woman. “Who are you and why are you hiding all these kids down here?” the officer demanded. The woman was Caitlyn Nelson, yet another employee of Play Mountain Place. Caitlyn attempted to play the victim, claiming she was just a babysitter who had only been working there for a couple of months and had only been in the basement “not very long.” It was a lie that crumbled instantly under the weight of the soiled diapers and the terrified, exhausted faces of the toddlers around her.
Officer Landon, showing zero tolerance for the ongoing theatrics, informed Caitlyn that she was facing, at the absolute minimum, severe obstruction charges. The officer knew Caitlyn had received the text message to silence the children. She knew this was a coordinated, deliberate effort to evade law enforcement at the profound expense of the children’s physical and psychological safety. Further investigation would later reveal that Caitlyn Nelson was not just a complicit babysitter; she was a woman with an active, outstanding warrant for her arrest at the exact moment she was locked in a basement with twenty-five toddlers. The layering of criminal negligence upon criminal history painted a horrifying picture of the vetting standards at Play Mountain Place.
Back upstairs, the reality of the situation came crashing down on Carla Marie Faith. The jig was unequivocally up. The false wall had been breached, the non-existent basement had been illuminated, and the twenty-five “soccer team” children were being carried up into the light of day. In a breathtaking display of narcissistic manipulation, Carla actually attempted to negotiate with the police. As she was being placed in handcuffs, she pleaded with the officers to un-cuff her so she could “help” call the parents and take care of the babies. She promised there would be “nothing squirrely.” It was the ultimate insult to the intelligence of the officers who had just spent hours unraveling her web of lies. Officer Landon, resolute and unyielding, shot down the request with a verbal hammer blow. She bluntly informed Carla that a woman who hides twenty-five infants in a dark, unventilated basement to avoid a licensing fine has permanently forfeited her right to “take care of babies.”
The logistical nightmare of reuniting twenty-five traumatized children with their parents began. As frantic mothers and fathers received the calls every parent dreads, rushing to the scene to pull their toddlers from the arms of police officers, Carla Marie Faith attempted one final, pathetic spin on the narrative. She instructed the parents over the phone not to rush, casually mentioning that the business was simply “closing down,” as if this were a routine administrative bankruptcy rather than the uncovering of a hostage situation.
The psychological toll this horrific ordeal took on the children was immense and lingering. Later interviews with the parents revealed the dark, enduring aftermath of Carla’s greed. Toddlers who were once cheerful and independent began suffering from severe night terrors. Many became intensely claustrophobic, completely unable to sleep in a dark room. The foundational trust these children had in the adults tasked with their care had been deeply, perhaps permanently, fractured. They had been treated not as human beings requiring love and stimulation, but as illicit inventory to be shoved into a dark hole the moment the authorities knocked on the door.
The judicial reckoning for the operators of Play Mountain Place was swift, though many argue it could never truly balance the scales of justice for the trauma inflicted. Carla Marie Faith, the architect of this underground holding pen, was stripped of her arrogance in a court of law. She was found guilty on a staggering 26 counts of child abuse without injury—one for every single child hidden, plus the overarching danger of the situation. Furthermore, she was convicted of a felony count of attempting to influence a public servant and a misdemeanor charge of obstructing a peace officer. The judge, recognizing the profound breach of public trust and the sheer, calculated nature of the deception, sentenced Carla to six years in state prison. Her empire of lies collapsed into a small, highly regulated cell where she currently awaits a parole hearing scheduled for August 2025.
The accomplices who facilitated this nightmare also faced the gavel. Caitlyn Nelson, the woman caught red-handed in the basement trying to silence crying toddlers while harboring an active warrant, pled guilty to 26 counts of child abuse without injury and one felony count of possession of controlled substances. In a display of continued disregard for the judicial system, she actually failed to show up for her initial court date—a habit she had established with several previous charges. When the law finally caught up with her, she was sentenced to 365 days in jail, receiving credit for 135 days of time served, followed by four years of intensive probation. The court mandated that she complete substance abuse evaluations, maintain monitored sobriety, undergo child abuse evaluations with recommended treatments, and complete 200 hours of community service. It was a sentence that heavily emphasized rehabilitation, though to the parents of the children she locked in the dark, it felt like a painfully light slap on the wrist.
Christina “Chrissy” Swager, the employee who had so casually leaned against a fence and lied directly to Officer Landon’s face about being a mere “friend” grabbing lunch, could not escape her complicity. The court saw through her performance, convicting her of 26 counts of child abuse without injury, a felony count of attempting to influence a public servant, and a misdemeanor charge of obstructing a peace officer. She was sentenced to two and a half years in prison, with an additional three years of mandatory parole, which she is currently serving. Her willingness to stand outside and actively lie to law enforcement while twenty-five children sat in a dark basement cemented her role as a vital cog in Carla’s abusive machine.
Finally, Valerie Fresquez, another employee entangled in the daycare’s operations, took a different path through the justice system. Recognizing the indefensible nature of the crimes, she pleaded guilty to the 26 counts of child abuse and accepted a highly conditional plea deal. In exchange for testifying against her former colleagues—breaking the code of silence that had allowed the basement to operate—she received a two-year deferred sentence in March 2021. By complying completely with the terms of her deferment and aiding the prosecution in securing convictions against Carla and the others, Fresquez successfully completed her sentence in March 2023, allowing her to legally withdraw her guilty plea and have all charges officially dismissed.
The story of Play Mountain Place is a harrowing reminder of the terrifying banality of evil. Carla Marie Faith did not fit the cinematic profile of a monster. She lived in a nice suburban neighborhood, drove a nice car, and operated a business built entirely on the concept of maternal care. Yet, driven by unchecked greed and a staggering hubris, she transformed a place of play into a subterranean prison. She looked desperate parents in the eye every morning, accepted their money, and subsequently treated their most precious loved ones like contraband to be smuggled and silenced. The false wall in her home was not just a physical barrier; it was a profound moral division, separating the outward illusion of a caring childcare provider from the dark, overcrowded reality of a woman who viewed children as nothing more than a profitable, expendable commodity. Thanks to the relentless intuition of Officer Landon, the sharp ears of Officer Parker, and a single, irrepressible cry from a child in the dark, the false wall was torn down. The twenty-five hidden children were brought back into the light, leaving behind a chilling legacy that will forever haunt the quiet streets of El Paso County.
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Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
