Recently, I received a shocking email from a contributor. In Middle River, Md, a 2-year-old boy and his grandmother were playing at a local elementary school playground. The little boy went down his favorite slide and soon began screaming in pain.
He was severely burned, with second and third-degree burns mostly on his legs, not because the slide was hot. Someone had broken into the school, taken bottles of industrialstrength drain cleaner containing strong concentrations of sulphuric acid, and poured them on the playground equipment.
He was taken to the Pediatric Burn Unit at Johns Hopkins Hospital, after the first hospital emergency room he visited had to be evacuated because the cleaner had been tracked in. The culprit would most likely have burns as well from handling the cleaner.
Who does things like this? After doing a little research, I found out that it was two teenage boys. They told police they had put the cleaner on the slide to see if it would melt the plastic and didn’t intend to harm anyone. That cleaner had also been "painted" onto other play equipment with a brush. Did they really mean to hurt someone? Messages of support were posted on one of the culprit’s social media page, terming what the boys did as a "mess," which suggests that there are those who either don’t realize the magnitude of injury for the toddler or think that all you have to do is call something a "mess," and it relieves responsibility for such actions?
There’s no way to downplay it for the little boy who endured skin graft surgeries and needed plenty of pain medication to ease his suffering. It wasn’t just his legs that were burned. You can probably imagine where else. His mother and stepfather noted they were glad he hadn’t gone down head first, as he would normally want to.
The culprits were released on $250,000 bail while he was still in the hospital.
The playground was cleaned up using tens of thousands of gallons of water. It’s incomprehensible that a person could commit such an act to jeopardize another human being, especially a child.
A playground should be a place where children feel safe and free to explore and have fun. It’s a tragedy to have that day be a traumatic memory for this little boy instead of a day he enjoyed playing with his grandmother at the playground. How do you reverse that feeling for him?
The answer is that you don’t. He couldn’t see that the slide was covered in cleaner with sulfuric acid in it, so he trusted and he climbed to the top, ready for one of what he most likely thought would be many fun trips down the slide.
