4-year-old shares heroin at daycare, thinking it was candy
A little girl at the Beginner’s Choice Daycare in Delaware who discovered little packets of whitish substance in her bag, thinking it was candy, distributed it to other children in her class.
According to reports, A teacher, Johnson noticed the little girl was passing something out to other children from a bag, and it looked like a tattoo. In line with the rules which prevents children from distributing things in school, the teacher told them to put them in them in their pockets thinking it was harmless. Another employee saw the packets later in the morning, recognized what they were and alerted Johnson, who immediately searched the children’s pockets and belongings. She collected the packets.
“I put it in a Food Lion bag and took it to the Selbyville police,” Johnson said. “I said to them, ‘can you tell me what this is?’ They recognized it as heroin right away, she said. “You wouldn’t have known. It looked like sugar.”
One of the officers recognized the substance and police did a field test, confirming it was heroin, said Selbyville Police Chief Scott Collins. Police and paramedics were dispatched to the day care, and two children went to the hospital as a precaution, Johnson said, but none of the children had eaten anything in the packets.
Johnson said she contacted parents of all the children and gave them the option of coming to pick their children up. Most asked if their child was safe, and when Johnson said yes, most chose to let their children finish the day as usual.
Johnson credits the teacher who enforced the classroom rules with preventing a much more serious situation. “If we didn’t stop it here, she [the child] would have gone to school at 11:40 and could have passed it out at school. She just thought it was candy. She didn’t know.”
There had been a party at the little girl’s house recently, Johnson said, where they’d had temporary tattoos with candy for the children, and the child thought that’s what she was sharing with classmates.
“We did our best,” Johnson said. “A lot of kids’ lives got saved. We kept them safe. Nobody got hurt.”
At a point I was scared one of them might have taken it. Who do blame?