Not the first time: Mother reveals daughter left in hot van before death of boy, 3
A mother has revealed the daycare company responsible for the death of a three-year-old child left her daughter in a hot van just almost two year prior.
The young child was left in horrific circumstances after he boarded a minibus owned by Goodstart Early Learning on Tuesday morning, but was forgotten and left inside the hot van until his body was found around 3 pm outside Hambledon State School, Cairns.
Certain details surrounding the heartbreaking incident remain unclear, but reports say the child had been left in the minibus all day as temperatures reached 34C.
Lisa Easton stepped forward after hearing about the horrifying tragedy, saying it brought back terrible memories for her family.
Ms Easton says her daughter Violet, now three-years-old, was left on a bus owned by the same company for more than an hour in January 2018 on the Gold Coast.
The mother revealed Violet might have met the same horrifying fate if an employee taking the garbage out hadn’t spotted her.
Now, in light of the death of the young child, Ms Easton is fighting back and has started a petition calling for the business to be shut down if a major safety overhaul of its “inadequate” procedures are not rectified.
“To my knowledge at the time [Violet was enrolled] there was only ever one driver, at the most there were two adults on the bus,” she told Daily Mail Australia.
“They would occasionally use a clipboard and check off names but that was mostly for drop off.”
She says the company told her they would be changing their procedures following little Violet’s sad ordeal.
“They promised me they now had three staff on each bus that would cross check each other before one would do a final sweep. It was worded to me in a way that I believed this was across the board,” she explained.
“I started the petition because when it happened to Violet I wanted to make sure to show they were incompetent and I wasn't going to sit back. They need to have an overhaul or go completely. They've shown they can't train staff.”
Since Violet’s own ordeal back in 2018, Ms Easton says her daughter has not returned back to day care and has developed anxieties.
“In the end I could hug my daughter and get peace out of that. But this mother can't,” she explained.
“I want to tell the boy's parents to stay strong as much as possible and to get support. There are no words - I mean what can you say?
“I tried to make sure this never happened. I am so sorry.”
The centre's CEO, Ms Davison, said that it would now stop both its morning pickup and afternoon drop-off services.
“We don't know what happened, all we know is that something went badly wrong yesterday,” she said.
“We have decided that with effect from today, we will cease our pickup and drop-off service. That has been a very difficult decision for us to make.
“We are going to see cease temporarily and we know that without our pickup and drop-off service, many children are not able to access high-quality early learning.
“But we feel that we need to just pause for a few days whilst we think about whether there are other things we can do to improve the safety of our transfers.
“We usually had lots of procedures and processes in and training in place anyway, but we want to look at what we can do to strengthen that. And we will no doubt have learnings from the investigation, but at this stage we don't know what happened yesterday.”