You think your child is in safe hands. And then they lose them, and didn’t even notice.
It is the stuff working parents push to the back of their mind as they kiss their little one goodbye at daycare.
Because it is just too horrible to think about. It is enough to make you want to sit at home and hold your child forever.
And it happened to a mum in the US.
Niyesha Griffin told 6abc that her son's daycare left the little 3-year-old Jeremiah behind in a park last week. And if a good Samaritan hadn't helped her son, he would never have made his way back to daycare.
If you think that is bad...there's more. She found out about her lost son on Facebook. A week after the incident.
Niyesha said that when the other children lined up to leave the park, "Jeremiah got out of line and [Sharon Temple Daycare] left him". And only found out about the incident when another mum contacted her on Facebook a week later.
"As soon as they found out my son was not in their care, they should have called me," Niyesha said. While the daycare centre told Jeremiah's father he was only lost for 10 minutes, it turns out that he was lost for more than an hour.
The good Samaritan found Jeremiah after all the children and their parents left the park. Niyesha said, "They sat outside for 15 minutes, she said, to see if anyone would come back to get him. No one did. So they went inside and contacted the police."
Local police confirmed that Jeremiah was returned to the day care at 1:06pm, while according to the day care notes, he went missing at 11:30am.
While the daycare staff apologised to Niyesha, she would like to thank the woman who looked after Jeremiah. "She kept my child safe and I appreciate that, because he could have been out here with anybody and they could have took my baby."
Niyesha has taken her son out of the daycare and the centre is on a 6-month warning.
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