Rochelle Dickerson doesn’t want to walk into her daycare anymore. Not with the piles of broken glass, or the mangled toys spread across the floor.
And especially not with the photo of her late son still pasted on the wall.
“I don’t go in,” Dickerson said. “It’s devastating.”
PoohBear’s House of Hugs was a daycare and after-school spot at the corner of East 10th Street and North Emerson Avenue. It’s been closed since April, when a shooting victim crashed a pickup truck into the building in the middle of the night. The driver died at the scene.
Pictured on Aug. 3, 2026, toys lay scattered on the ground among dust and debris, showcasing the aftermath of a driver who crashed into PoohBear’s House of Hugs daycare in April and the incomplete construction since. Credit: Brett Phelps/Mirror Indy/CatchLight Local/Report for America
Dickerson, 61, opened PoohBear’s House of Hugs in 2019 on the east side after running an in-home daycare before that. Around 100 kids and teens were enrolled when it closed.
Dickerson has no plans to return to the building. The inside still needs thousands of dollars in fixes, and she said the property manager stopped returning her calls.
Dickerson wants to move her daycare to a nearby location at East 21st Street and North Emerson Avenue.
But with most of her income disappearing, Dickerson doesn’t have the money for a down payment.
“I’m doing bad,” she said.
Dickerson said she still needs about $2,500 and has a GoFundMe campaign to help cover the cost.
‘This is a memory of my son’
The daycare’s namesake seems obvious: Winnie the Pooh. But there’s more to it than that.
Dickerson’s son, Rodriquez “Pooh” Anderson, was found dead in his car on the east side on Jan. 3, 2018. He was 27.
Before his death, Dickerson said her son was determined to help her get the building that became PoohBear’s House of Hugs.
“This is a memory of my son,” Dickerson said.
Leaving the building behind will be hard, she said. But she doesn’t see another option.
“I thought about it, and I prayed about it,” Dickerson said. “So I have to.”
Her husband, Will Dickerson, said it’s been hard watching his wife deal with the loss of the daycare.
“She wakes up in the middle of the night crying,” he said. “I can’t do nothing but just hold her.”
‘She cares about her kids’
Arniya Cook, a 3-year-old, went to the daycare for almost her whole life. Arniya is one of four kids who stayed enrolled with Dickerson at her home after the daycare closed.
“I like to do the toys and my bike,” she said.
Arniya’s mom, Victoria Cook, said she loved the daycare because of Dickerson’s dedication — from being open six days a week to celebrating the kids’ birthdays.
“She cares about her kids,”Cook said. “She goes all out for them.”
As for Arniya, Cook said her daughter doesn’t totally understand what happened to the daycare but has been asking questions.
“She just knows we’re not going there no more,” Cook said.
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Mirror Indy reporter Tyler Fenwick covers housing and labor. Contact him at 317-766-1406 or tyler.fenwick@mirrorindy.org. Follow him on X @ty_fenwick and Bluesky @tyfenwick.bsky.social.
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