A New York fourth-grader, son of a Guyanese woman, fatally choked on meatballs in a Bronx school cafeteria last December as staff looked on and did nothing to save him, his family and a witness told the New York Post.
School officials reportedly even screamed at Jonathan Jewth to save himself as the 9-year-old lay prone on the floor of the cafeteria of PS 47 in Parkchester, an eyewitness told The Post.
“I saw the boy start choking but nobody was helping,” said Andrea Perez, 25, who was in the cafeteria to pick up her daughter from school when tragedy struck on Dec. 5 shortly after noon.
“The only thing the lunch ladies did was go up to the boy on the floor and yell at him to put his own fingers down his throat. He had been unconscious already for a while”, the December 17 edition of The Post reported.
Perez told the newspaper she did not know how to help resuscitate the boy — who apparently had two meatballs in his throat — so she called 911 and began to scream for help.
At one point, another parent visiting the school heard Perez’s screams and tried to pry the food from the boy’s mouth, the report said.
Finally, Jewth was rushed to Jacobi Medical Center after the incident, which left him in cardiac arrest and not breathing.
At the hospital, family members were told the boy was in a coma and had suffered severe brain damage.
He died several days later when his parents made the gut-wrenching decision to take him off life support, family members said.
“We were told that there were parents and other attendants there, but the attendants apparently weren’t trained to handle the situation,” Deonauth Ramrup, a cousin of the boy’s mother, told The Post.
His devastated mother Khemwati Jewth, a Guyanese, has hit out at the school for failing to perform the necessary first aid on her dying son.
She told the New York Daily News: ‘If something had been done differently, my son would’ve been alive today.
“They’re saying that they did everything, but others are saying that there was no one around at the time”, she told the Daily News.
“They have provided her with scant information regarding the disastrous event that has transpired and until now she is relying on information provided by individuals who claim to have witnessed some or all of the events,” an attorney for his mother, Howard Frederick told NBC4.
“Ms. Jewth is committed to finding the truth and has indicated that she will not rest until she knows exactly what happened to her only child,” her attorney said in a statement.
A responding statement by the schools’ chancellor Dennis Walcott read: “tragically, a student passed away and my heart goes out to the family and the school community.”
“I don’t have words to describe how I feel right now. Nobody can even understand what I am going through,” Ms Jewth has said.
