Former day care operator Sheila Caceres made her first court appearance Friday under the withering gaze of the mother of the baby who died after being left in her care last February.

Caceres, 31, did not enter a plea and left the Sacramento County courthouse without speaking to reporters.

Rachelle Rominger, the mother of 2-month-old Avin Rominger, sat through the brief hearing in a front-row seat.

"It was difficult being in the same room as the person who let your child die," Rominger said. "What do you say? How should I feel? I don't know."

Caceres faces charges of felony child endangerment and a misdemeanor violation of fire safety regulations for allowing day care children to be on her home's second floor.

Sacramento County sheriff's investigators say Caceres found Avin limp and unresponsive last February and panicked. Instead of calling 911, she left the baby alone upstairs in distress, they say.

When Avin's father, Dave Rominger, arrived to pick the baby up, she allegedly went upstairs, pretended to find Avin in trouble for the first time and ran downstairs shouting for the father to call 911.

Her attorney, Joe Welch, ignored a reporter's question Friday about what plea she might enter and walked her out of the courthouse.

She is due back in court Dec. 9. Deputy District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert asked Judge Gary Ransom to make certain Caceres knows she cannot care for or be around children other than her own.

"No baby-sitting, nothing," Schubert said.

"You understand that?" Ransom asked Caceres, adding, "You violate that, I'm putting you in jail."

Caceres, once the county's "family child care provider of the year," already has agreed to a lifetime ban by the state from owning, working in or being present in a day care home.

Avin's cause of death is listed by the coroner as sudden unexpected infant death.

But coroner's officials indicated in a sheriff's report on the case that "medical intervention could have saved the baby's life."

Rachelle Rominger, a 911 dispatcher who learned her baby was in trouble when her husband's 911 call came in to a co-worker, said Caceres "has shown no remorse to our family whatsoever, and I expected no less today."

She added that she was not concerned about the case being put off for a month.

"It tells me there is justice for my son, it's coming," she said. "I believe in the people of Sacramento, and I believe that when the people of Sacramento hear the facts of this case that Sheila Caceres will go to jail."

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