A Brooklyn mother is demanding answers after surveillance video showed her 2-year-old son tumbling down about 15 stairs at his Bedford-Stuyvesant daycare, an incident she says staff responded to by handing her ice packs instead of immediately calling 911. Anetra Williams says her son, Khaleel, was near the top of a staircase at BumbleBeesRus on Fulton Street when a gate swung shut and struck him moments before he fell.
According to News12 Brooklyn, the footage shows three adults reaching for the closing gate but failing to catch the toddler before he went down the stairs. The station reported that one adult in the video appeared to pick up something from the floor as the fall unfolded, and News12 blurred the faces of the adults shown in the clip.
Williams told the station that staff gave Khaleel ice packs but said they could not call 911 until she arrived at the daycare, which she says took about 30 minutes. She said Khaleel remained conscious after the fall and was ultimately taken to a hospital, but she believes emergency responders should have been summoned immediately rather than after she was contacted.
A Mother's Trust Broken
Williams said she had trusted BumbleBeesRus to watch over and protect her child, a trust the same News12 report says she now says is gone. She told the station she is worried about Khaleel's long-term health and that he will not be returning to the daycare.
As of September 18, the adults shown in the video had not been charged with a crime, per the report. Neither BumbleBeesRus nor the New York City Department of Education, both of which News12 contacted for comment, had responded by the time the station published its story.
Broader Scrutiny of Child-Care Oversight in New York
The incident lands amid wider public debate over how New York polices day-care safety. A New York State Senate report has questioned at what point a child's safety and health should outweigh the need to keep a day care with persistent violations open. Separately, the state's Office of Children and Family Services maintains a public list of providers subject to enforcement action, which includes at least one Bronx program, Bronx House Inc., marked as closed after having its license revoked and a subsequent application denied, according to the New York State Office of Children and Family Services.
Other reporting has documented repeated safety lapses at child-care sites elsewhere in the city. NYCity News Service found that health inspectors visited one school three times in 2023 and turned up serious safety violations on each visit, according to the outlet's Day Care Danger project. A decade earlier, a Brooklyn day-care center was shut down after a worker was caught striking children with a Wiffle ball bat, ABC7 New York reported at the time. None of those cases have been shown to be connected to BumbleBeesRus.
For now, the central facts of Khaleel's fall rest on Williams's account and the surveillance video reviewed by News12, with no official finding yet released by police, the Department of Education or child-care licensing authorities. Williams says she simply wants accountability for what happened to her son on that staircase.
