After a quick run to the shop a young mother returned home on Tuesday night to find her baby lying on a mattress partially engulfed in flames. Half of the child’s body was burnt.

Zabeeda Mohamed, of Lot 18 De Willem, West Coast Demerara rushed her 4-month-old daughter, Anjalie, to the Georgetown Public Hospital (GPH) just after 8 pm on Tuesday. Mohamed will now be spending Christmas with her child in the hospital’s Burn Care Unit.

GPH in a press release yesterday said the child was brought to the Accident and Emergency Unit with burns about her body. The child, the release said, reportedly sustained burns from “a kerosene lamp which was left lit in the home as her mother went to the shop.”

“I lef’ to go to de shop and by the time I come back I see de mattress on fire and I barely scramble me baby off it,” the 19-year-old mother of two said.

Mohamed said she left her baby home and told her two-year-old to keep an eye on her. The woman said as soon as she saw the flames she immediately grabbed her child while her brother, who had arrive by that time, threw the mattress out of the house and doused it with water.

“I seh I going to de shop to buy a bag of tennis roll and I tell me big daughter, she is two, to keep an eye on baby,” the woman recalled, “but like de breeze blow de curtain and knock down de lamp and it fall on de bed with baby.”

One side of her child’s body, Mohammed said, was burnt.

“She whole one side get burn but de doctor talk to me this afternoon and he tell me that me daughter going to be alright,” Mohamed said.