1 Year Old Locked Alone In Day Care Centre At Night

There is no worse nightmare for parents than the idea that their child could be alone and abandoned at night.

But there’s no excuse for that to happen at a place where parents expect their kids to be safe — in a day care centre.

This was the reality for one-year-old Journee Jones from Chicago last October when she was locked inside the “All Things Are Possible For Kids” Daycare Centre after all the staff had gone home. When her father Cornelius Jones arrived 15 minutes before the daycare’s closing time, he found that the doors were already locked and nobody appeared to be around.

Distraught at the idea that his daughter was locked in the dark day care centre all alone and unable to gain entry into the property, he called the local fire department to get her out. They arrived in a short time and were able to force open the door where they found a crying Journee waiting to be rescued. Although a little scared, the baby was luckily safe and well.

Rescuing Journee

A startling video captures the moment that police officers and responders entered the building with the sound of Journee hysterically crying in the dark building. Police searched the building and were able to follow her sound. They then take her and reunite her with her worried dad.

Incredibly, the day care staff who was involved in the situation could’nt give an acceptable reason for their mistake. They said that they had closed up because they thought Journee was a doll. “Why there was no sign-in book and why the centre had not been properly checked before being closed?”, they could not answer.

Both Journee’s parents were furious of the excuse. Journee’s mum states that, it was an inadequate response to their mistake and her dad saying:

“Nobody should leave kids behind, they’re toddlers! No matter how old they are, it’s dangerous to leave them.”

Not The Only One

Surprisingly, this isn’t the first time an incident has happened like this at a day care centre with similar case coming to light in Australia earlier this year. The case involved the operators of the “Starshine Childcare Centre” in Marys Mount, Goulburn who plead guilty of leaving a two-year-old child unattended at their facility for almost three hours last year.

The operators of the centre originally pleaded not guilty to the offence, but after the details were examined in court, the husband and wife team did admit their guilt. They were charged with not adequately supervising children under their care. The company that owns the childcare centre was also charged with failing to report the incident, as the manager took nine days to inform the Department of Education and Care.

A Simple Solution

Obviously, there’s no point in blaming childcare centres for these cases or questioning whether their kids are safe in this kind of care. For most parents, there’s no choice but to put their kids into childcare so they can work or take care of other children. However, it shouldn’t be that much to ask if the childcare centres have clear regulations in place to prevent these incidents from happening and for security purposes.

In the case of Journee, a simple sign-in/sign-out roll book would have been a simple way of keeping track of who hadn’t been picked up so that the entire shambles could have been avoided.