One-year-old Jabarie Stanford remains in critical condition at the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation after sustaining third degree burns when the mattress the boy was sleeping on caught fire in his ‘D’ Field Sophia home on Saturday.
Stanford’s mother Rehanna Jones told Stabroek News that “he looks better today,” she began to cry and stated that while the one year old appeared like he was healing she felt as though she was “just waiting and waiting for my baby to die, he was so burned and the doctors saying that he is really bad I can’t bear to think of my son like this, he is just a baby.”
Jones said that she was at a loss as to where to go from here, “my other son is crying all the time he is so upset,” she stated that due to the fire her children did not have shoes or clothes to go to school with on Monday. Jones was emotional when she stated that Child Welfare would be speaking with her today. “What if they lock me up? My children have me alone now…I would never leave them, my neighbour would check on them and watch them, my brother”.
Jones said that her eight year daughter ran to the neighbour after her seven year old son and another neighbourhood child were playing with paper and matches in the house. “The neighbour told my daughter to go in and tell the boys to stop. My daughter told me that the other boy (neighbour’s son) and my son were playing with some paper and matches but my daughter told them to stop it and come outside they didn’t realize that the fire start.”
The boy’s mother stated that “these are all things I’m hearing, but I don’t really know because no one is really sure how the fire started on the mattress.”
On Saturday Jones left her three children to go to work; they were being supervised by a neighbour and by their uncle. Jones said that the children’s uncle would pass by and make sure they ate and would watch them while the neighbour attended to her own home.
This newspaper was told that after hearing the screams, neighbours saw smoke emanating from the structure but by then the mattress that Stanford was lying on was engulfed and so was he. Several young men used buckets of water to quell the fire after which the badly injured child was picked up and rushed to the hospital.
