Story By: John Feng, Sub Editor: Joseph Golder, Agency: Asia Wire Report
This four-year-old was allegedly locked in a hot school bus as punishment and then forgotten about as he was left inside the baking vehicle for hours.
The boy who attends Tongxin Kindergarten in the county of Lingyuan, which is in Liaoning Province in north-eastern China, was only found some eight hours later on 18th June.
The boy’s father, Mr Ma, alleges his son was intentionally locked inside the silver van used for pupil transport after he apparently fought with other kids inside the bus on the morning of his death.
Pictures Credit: AsiaWire
The parent said: “We sent our child to the west side of our village at 8:10am and then his teachers picked him up.
“By around 4:30pm, after he should’ve finished school, no one had called us and we had no idea what was happening.
“All the other children had been sent home already except for ours. Our family called his nursery school teachers. Their phones rang but nobody answered.
“Then a relative went to the school to check and then called my mother-in-law. I was working at the time. They told me to hurry home because something bad had happened.”
The lifeless four-year-old was found in the vehicle by school staff late in the afternoon, with the boy suspected of having suffocated to death several hours earlier in the hot van as temperatures reached highs of 33 degrees Celsius.
Mr Ma said: “He was fighting with some of the other kids, so his teacher put him in the front and punished him by not letting him out when they arrived.”
The Lingyuan Public Security Bureau confirmed in a statement on 20th June that the nursery school’s director, surnamed Rong, who also drives the bus, had been arrested.
The boy’s teacher Shi, as well as another senior staff member Zhou, were also detained.
The trio faces charges of gross negligence manslaughter.
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