How does this keep happening?
January 28th, 2009 at 01:33pm
It’s virtually a boilerplate story now:
A [man/woman] broke the window of a [insert location here] childcare centre with a [insert object here] when [he/she] arrived to find the building locked, the lights out and [his/her] tiny [son/daughter] trapped inside.
This time around it’s a woman from Darwin with a brick:
A woman broke the window of a Darwin childcare centre with a brick when she arrived to find the building locked, the lights out and her tiny son trapped inside.
Yula Williams, 30, said she could hear her eight-month-old baby Xavier “screaming and crying”.
“It made me terrified to know that my son was inside the centre, locked and in the dark,” she said.
Ms Williams had dropped her son off at the centre in the Darwin suburb of Wagaman around 8am (CST) on Tuesday and went to work.
She had dropped her car off at a local mechanic and arranged for one of her cousins to collect her son from the centre before it closed at 6pm (CST). But when she arrived home later that night her son was not at the house.
“It was just a mother’s instinct that I went back to the childcare centre and looked around,” she said.
Ms Williams arrived at the centre shortly before 6pm but staff had already left the building. After scanning all the the security screens the frantic mother climbed the back of the building to call Xavier’s name through elevated slats.”I couldn’t hear him from the outside but when I walked around and called through the vents to the bedrooms I heard him scream,” she told ABC radio in Darwin.
Desperate to get to her tiny son, Ms Williams then picked up a brick from the garden bed and smashed it through a window.
[..]
Ms Williams said that while she could understand the misunderstanding with her relative over the pickup arrangements, she could not understand how the centre had not called her to let her know that no-one had come to collect her son.
Police said they were continuing to conduct investigations into the incident.
I think Ms. Williams summed it up with the statement that she “could not understand how the centre had not called her to let her know that no-one had come to collect her son”, and it’s completely beyond me how they managed to lock up with a child still on the premises…surely the register would have told them that there was still a child in the centre, even if they couldn’t see him.
And with the publicity that stories just like this one have received in recent times, one does have to wonder how long it will be before incompetence is seriously considered as the reason for these stuff ups.
Samuel
Entry Filed under: Bizarreness,General News,Samuel's Editorials