5-year-old hands out heroin at day care center in Buffalo
Pastor Dale Morgan
5-year-old hands out heroin at day care center in Buffalo*
3 children test positive for drug
By T.J. Pignataro - News Staff Reporter
Updated: 06/15/07 9:11 AM
A Black Rock couple was flabbergasted to learn their 5-year-old son
brought a wrapped “ten pack” of heroin into his day care center Tuesday,
passing it off to other children as “candy.”
Howell Street residents Wayne Clamp and Kari Lyn Lee believe their son
somehow obtained the package near or inside the YWCA Schoolhouse Commons
day care center at 1005 Grant St. as he and his two sisters, aged 2 and
4, were being walked there by Lee about 8 a.m. Tuesday.
The boy’s parents think he thought he’d found some candy and handed it
out to his sisters and friends inside.
“It was all wrapped up in waxed paper and they had smile faces stamped
on them like these M&Ms,” Clamp said, showing a reporter an M&M candy
bag. Clamp said he was shown the packets of heroin by police after it
was confiscated.
“He didn’t think it was something bad,” Clamp said. “He said it smelled
like bread crumbs.”
The boy apparently had passed about four of the packages around to as
many as five other children — ages 2 through 4 — in the day care center,
according to Buffalo police reports. All six exposed children were
rushed by ambulance to Women and Children’s Hospital.
The 2-year-old girl and 5-year-old boy apparently ingested the heroin
and tested positive, as did a 2 1/2-year-old girl classmate. None of the
children was reported to have been seriously injured. All were treated
and released.
Buffalo police took the heroin to a lab for analysis.
Clamp and Lee’s three children, as well as Lee’s 7-year-old son, were
taken into the custody of Child Protective Services. A Family Court
judge placed them in the care of Lee’s mother pending a July 11 court date.
Clamp and Lee both insist the heroin did not come from their house. They
said they don’t use drugs and can’t understand why their children were
removed from their house.
Meanwhile, operations at the daycare center — located in the former
School 42, a large brick building that also houses senior apartments,
office space and the Native American Center — were suspended by the
state Office of Child and Family Services, pending investigation into
the incident.
Neither officials from the Office of Children & Family Services nor
Katherine Lwebuga-Mukasa, the chief executive officer for the local
YWCA, could be reached after hours Thursday for comment. Other officials
at the YWCA refused to comment.
Humboldt Parkway resident Tracy Pritchett, the adoptive mother of twin 2
1/2-year-old girls — one of whom tested positive for the presence of the
drugs — still wasn’t sure late Thursday who was to blame for the
incident, but she was upset it could happen at a day care center she
believed was safe.
“It’s unbelievable,” Pritchett said. “There’s a huge lack of supervision
between either the parents of the children or the providers there.”
Pritchett, who has five other children, said her adopted twin daughters
already have had a rough start to their young lives. The twins are
developmentally delayed because of being exposed to narcotics in their
first year of life by their biological mother, who was a drug abuser.
“They were born premature, they have delayed speech and intellectual
functions . . . they’ve already beat a lot of the odds and then this
happens to them,” Pritchett said. “She could have been killed.”