Arizona hospital employee drops premature newborn in harrowing footage

WARNING: The above video contains graphic content that may be unsettling for some viewers.

An Arizona couple is speaking out after they claim a hospital employee's mistake caused one of their newborn twin daughters to suffer a brain hemorrhage.

Monique Rodgers and her husband, Derrick, welcomed their premature twin girls, Morgan and Madison, on Feb. 14 at Dignity Health Chandler Regional Medical Center.

While Derrick was filming the girls' births, he captured the moment a hospital employee dropped Morgan, who weighed just three pounds and four ounces, onto the edge of a table below.

In the harrowing footage, the employee, who the Rodgers identified as a doctor, barely catches the tiny baby before she nearly bounces from the table onto the ground below.

"I feel like she was treated like a sack of potatoes," Monique told KNXV-TV. "I kind of promised myself that I would never watch that video again."

Derrick told the station he later confronted the employee who was holding Morgan at the time of the incident.

"I told him, 'You dropped my baby,'" the father told KNXV-TV. "He had like a nonchalant look on his face. Then I showed him the video, and he had nothing to say after that."

"It made me so mad. Like, I had to stop recording," he added.

Monique took to Facebook on Wednesday to share the footage after she and her husband learned that a head ultrasound performed on Morgan five days after her birth revealed she had a grade 1 hemorrhage on the left side of her brain.

The mom of four wrote that, while she remains unsure if the hemorrhage was the result of her daughter's low birth weight or the dropping incident, she is angry that she wasn't informed of the test result at all until this past Saturday, "when I brought up a different concern to her doctor."

The parents say that, while Morgan seems to be generally healthy, she occasionally exhibits a worrisome pattern of behavior that they believe may have been caused by the fall.

"She does this like tensing up and her body kind of shakes," Monique said.

The hospital told KNXV-TV that it is unable to comment on the case due to "patient privacy laws and a request from the family not to release information."