Video shows childcare worker wearing a Halloween mask to terrorise young children
By Merryn Porter |
When we drop our children off at a childcare centre or preschool, we hope they are being cared for by compassionate staff.
But a childcare centre in the US is now at the centre of an investigation after a video emerged of a staff member wearing a Halloween mask to terrorise the young children in their care.
The video came to light in the past two days after another staff member at the childcare centre in the US state of Tennessee uploaded the video to the popular information sharing website Reddit.
Watch the video above.?
The original video, entitled "Daycare Workers in Mississippi use a Scream mask to scare children" was uploaded to two Reddit groups along with an update, reportedly from the person who recorded the video.
The three-minute video starts with a childcare worker who is wearing a mask from the movie Scream. She walks up to a table of six children who are eating their lunch before grabbing one child, who is terrified and crying, and screaming in their face.
The worker targets more children at the table and screams in their faces as the terrified children cry. ?
The worker then exits before the video restarts in another room where other children are seated having lunch.
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They begin screaming in terror as soon as the childcare worker enters the room and targets children.
The next scene shows a door of another room opening. A childcare worker says, "She is coming" to the person holding the camera before she enters the room where the worker in the mask is waiting. She tells the staff member who has been 'good' and 'bad'.
The staff member in the mask goes up to one child and says "Are you being bad?" before yelling in his face, "Do I need to take you outside?". She then screams at the young boy and adds, "You better be good."
The other childcare worker in the room can be seen throwing her head back and laughing. That staff member then enters another room and announces, "I hope you're all ready."
?Two children attempt to hide behind a set of drawers before the masked worker pounds on the door and enters. The children immediately begin to wail and put up their hands in defence as she walks towards them.
A staff member says, "They're supposed to be cleaning up Monster,"? before the masked worker yells at them to pick up items off the floor. When one child attempts to run away, she chases him and says, "You can't run" before catching him."
She then screams in their faces before continually yelling at the toddlers to "clean up."
The person claiming to have recorded the video said on Reddit, that as the post had gone viral, they wanted to explain why they made the video and went public.
"A couple of weeks ago some girls at the daycare bought Halloween masks to scare the kids," they wrote. "They did it and I never got it on video.
"The kids were terrified but [I] knew if [I] told the owner, it would be a slap on the wrist for them as I've complained about other things in the past and nothing ever got done.
"So, when [I] heard she was going to do it again, I recorded to get the proof and then the video was sent to parents to show them how their child was being treated.
"I did not video this for s--ts and giggles. It was not funny to me. I did not get amusement out of this.
"The one screaming in the kids' faces is NOT me. The one standing next to the girl screaming is NOT me. That laughing in the video is NOT me.
"I'm just now getting the proof needed to help get those people out of that daycare and away from those children."
She said "calling the cops wouldn't have done any good" without any proof.
"The cameras in that daycare do not record so there was no going back and checking," she said.
The person went on to state they had "nothing to hide" and did what they thought "was best in that moment."
"Maybe, I didn't handle it 100 per cent how [I] should have, but my intentions were good," adding they just wanted to make people aware what was happening and it be "taken care of."
The person added they had received death threats from people who didn't "know the truth" but said "if it wasn't for me and another co-worker, this probably would have happened tomorrow also."
Multiple media outlets have named the centre where it happened as the Lil' Blessings Child Care & Learning Centre.
The Monroe Journal newspaper has reported that four staff members were fired in the wake of the video being made public and both the Mississippi State Department of Health and the Monroe County Sheriff's Office were investigating the matter.
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