Warning: Images may be distressing to some readers
A mother has been left devastated after she picked her sons’ up from a daycare excursion to a local water park and found them left with horrific second and third degree burns — while staff, allegedly, looked on and laughed.
Shaunna Broadway shared the images of her boys, aged 5 and 7, crying and with blisters covering their bodies to Facebook in an attempt to shame the centre. What has emerged is a classic case of ‘he said, she said’.
Broadway, from Oklahoma, maintains that when she went to pick up her boys from their Learning Centre at 5pm they were visibly burnt and distressed. She told Buzzfeed Life, ” [The employees] were actually making fun of my older son, because both boys got sunburns but he was being a ‘baby’ and crying about it”.
The daycare has denied the claims, stating that while they did not provide sunscreen, the children also disobeyed carer instructions by taking their shirts off.
By the time Broadway took her fair-skinned, red-haired boys’ home on what she claims to be a day when temperatures reached 47 degrees Celsius, their pain had worsened.
“We took the boys to the local hospital on Saturday, where the doctors lanced the boils and blisters on their backs, applied cream, and sent us home with more pain medicine,” says Broadway to Buzzfeed Life.
“But the boys kept screaming and crying all day. My oldest one’s chest started hurting and he said he was having trouble breathing.
“Apparently the swelling and pain on his back was so bad that he was having pressure on his chest.”
The matter is currently being investigated by the Oklahoma Department of Human Services.
Broadway has vowed to not stop fighting for justice.
“My kids need a voice — I’m that voice, and I just want justice for them. And I don’t want this to ever happen to anyone else.”