When parents drop their children off at daycare, they trust that their child will be looked after and kept safe while they are at work. That’s why Chicago father Cornelius Jones was stunned when he arrived to pick up his one year-old daughter from daycare after a long day at work to find a locked door and darkened building.
His baby girl was nowhere to be found…
Cornelius frantically rang the doorbell and called the business over and over again, but nobody answered or came to the door. He was officially in the middle of every parent’s worst nightmare, as his daughter was missing.
Suddenly, Cornelius heard his baby girl crying from inside the locked up daycare, and he realized she had been left locked inside all along! He called 911 immediately and firefighters quickly showed up to break down the daycare’s door. What they found inside left them stunned…
The firefighters found Cornelius’s baby daughter Journee crawling around on the floor in the dark, completely alone. With no supervision, a baby like Journee could have been severely injured in these circumstances.
“I was glad that she was OK, but I was like real mad, I was mad because how could you leave a baby in a daycare, how could a child go unaccounted for,” Cornelius said.
The daycare director Tommie Butler claimed that this was all an accident, saying that a staffer had put Journee down for a nap and forgot about her. When all the other children were picked up, the other staffers assumed everyone was gone and locked up for the day, according to Butler. Journee’s mother Quanesha, however, isn’t having any of it.
“But my thing is, I come here and I sign her in and out, and so why wasn’t the list checked before everybody left?” she said.
Making matters worse, Butler’s defense has been that her staffers thought Journee was a doll when they left her alone napping. Quanesha and Cornelius now want this sham of a daycare to be shut down so that no other parents have to go through this.
Find out more about this in the video below, and SHARE this story so your friends and family can see it as well!
COMMENTS POLICY: We have no tolerance for messages of violence, racism, vulgarity, obscenity or other such discourteous behavior. Thank you for contributing to a respectful and useful online dialogue.