A young child, aged 5, was discovered wandering by himself at 5:30 a.m. yesterday outside a Queens laundromat, an incident generating both community concern and police action. According to NBC New York, the boy, found alone and apparently unsupervised, was sporting a white tank top and tan shorts outside the establishment located on Seagirt Boulevard in Far Rockaway.
Surveillance footage captured the child aimlessly meandering through the parking lot, while an observant laundromat employee took decisive action, bringing the child to safety and notifying authorities of the situation, as detailed in a report by ABC7 New York, the child has autism which complicates communication, he is non-verbal, making it challenging for those who sought to assist him to grasp his identity or how to contact his family.
The boy was quickly taken to St John's Episcopal Hospital to undergo evaluation and was subsequently placed in the care of ACS, fortunately unharmed. Later investigations led the NYPD to the child's local residence a block away from the laundromat, where they found an additional seven children left unsupervised leading to the arrest of their mother.
The mother, who was arrested for leaving her children unattended to reportedly commit a robbery in Brooklyn, initially denied having any children when approached by law enforcement, Elizabeth Jimenez, a co-worker of the laundromat employee who found the child recounted the boy's disoriented state expressing "it's sad," and noting the hardship of communicating without the child being able to speak or give information, she told ABC7 New York.
In the wake of the incident, community members expressed their dismay and the importance of cherishing one's children regardless of circumstantial challenges; Dee Dee Mumford, a local parent, underscored this, saying, "Times get hard and sometimes you get desperate but there are resources out there and nothing is worth losing your children," as she remarked to ABC7 New York.
