UPDATE: Remember 11-Year-Old Girl Burned with Hot Water? See How She’s Doing Now
11-year-old Jamoneisha “Jamoni” Merritt was rushed to hospital with horrific burns after her friend, Aniya Grant Stuart, 12, poured boiling water on her while she slept at a house in the Bronx, New York, on 7 August (read here).
Jamoneisha was taken to intensive care at Harlem Hospital Centre and spent days being treated for second-degree burns over 85% of her face before she was discharged on Friday.
The upbeat youngster, whose face was discoloured and swollen by the boiling water, now looks back to normal, saying she feels “great” following her return home.
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”Now I’m dancing and listening to music,” she told New York Daily News.
Jamoneisha will still miss classes and start home-schooling in order to avoid spending time in the sun while burns to her arms and shoulders continue to heal.
”Her arm is still raw it hasn’t healed yet … [and she] can’t go outside in the sun,” said her mother, Ebony Merritt. ”It’s going to take maybe about six months for all her color to come back in.”
“I didn’t know what they was gonna do but I felt tired. So after I was dancing I just sat on the couch and I fell asleep.”
She further said when the water was poured onto her ”I was screaming because it burned, it burned, it burned, it burned”.
Aniya’s mother applied ice to Jamoni and gave her a cold shower. The teen girls offered a half-hearted apology and said it was an accident, Jamoni added.
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”They were saying stop yelling and buggin,” she recalled.
”The mother is just as involved as the other kids. This happened at 4 a.m. but they didn’t come to my house until 5:30. That means she was there for an hour and a half while they were trying to cover their tracks, Ebony said.
Police are looking into whether the incident was inspired by a YouTube trend known as the “Hot Water Challenge”, where children throw boiling water over unsuspecting friends.
Aniya reportedly tried to kill herself with a knife after she saw the injuries she had inflicted on her friend.
Photo credit: NYD News/GoFundMe
Wow. Thank God for her life.
hmmmmn
This is just an expensive play. May God grant her speedy recovery.