A six-year-old girl was rushed to the Georgetown Public Hospital (GPH) on Saturday evening suffering from burns to the lower part of her body which she sustained from a pot of boiling water.
Rhonda DeWeever, whose address was given as Lot 1818 Norton Street, Wortmanville, was taken to the hospital around 9 pm on Saturday night and is now a patient in the hospital’s paediatric ward.
According to information, at the time of the incident the child was at home with her grandmother and five siblings, the eldest of whom is seven years old and the youngest, eight months. The parents of the children were not at home at the time. It is understood that the grandmother is elderly and not very mobile. Their home, which is the lower flat of a two-storey building, does not have electricity and the grandmother was boiling a pot of water to make tea for the children. Because the house does not have light the grandmother reportedly took the kerosene stove out of the kitchen and placed it on a table in another part of the house. She was putting the eight-month-old baby to sleep as the water boiled, and it was at that point that little Rhonda reportedly attempted to light a mosquito coil at the stove and the pot tilted, causing its contents to burn her from the waist down.
Her screaming alerted a neighbour who rushed the child to the hospital as the grandmother was incapable of doing so. Reports at the hospital indicated that police officers at the outpost were about to arrest the neighbour because they assumed she was the child’s mother, until the woman explained that she was just helping the child. It is understood that welfare officers at the hospital are investigating the incident.
