CRAIG CO., Va. – Angel Letchford and her husband have been sending their son Briar to the Craig County Child Care Center for the past few months.
Because they both work overlapping shifts, they need to send him to daycare because they can’t constantly ask people to watch over him.
To their surprise, they received a call from the Care Center early Friday morning telling them that their son had gone unnoticed and slipped out of a gate and into the parking lot and streets by himself.
“His teacher had to use the bathroom, so another teacher came to relieve her so that she could,” Letchford said. “The newer teacher forgot to put the lock back on the gate, he got out and wandered off.”
Briar was eventually found by a Virginia State Trooper in the middle of Route 311 by himself.
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“He had walked all the way from the back playground where the little kids were, all the way through the parking lot and through Brooks Street and into the road,” Letchford said.
Believing Briar to be from a nearby house, the trooper scooped him up and brought him to a nearby residence before taking him back to the daycare.
According to a letter sent by the Craig County Child Care Center given to 10 News by Letchford, Briar was “gone for approximately 3 minutes before he was safely returned to the center.”
However, according to the Virginia State Police Facebook page, Briar “was away from the teacher for approximately 11 minutes.”
“Many people try to say, this is just an accident, but this is beyond an accident, this is negligence,” Jamie Greenway, Angel’s mother and Briar’s grandmother, said. “He was gone for eleven minutes. Had that trooper had not been there, it could have been a very different ending to the story.”
Now, the family wants action taken against the teachers and new safety measures to be put in place.
“[Just] have better systems to better keep track of all the kids,” Letchford said. “You look away for a second and boom, a child is gone and you didn’t even know.”
“We were very lucky and blessed that nothing bad happened to Briar,” Greenway said. “From my personal standpoint, if I were to let this go without making sure something was done about it, I would feel responsible if something were to happen to another child in the future.”
10 News contacted the Craig County Child Care Center regarding the incident, but they declined to comment.
