Trinidad: Mom wants probe into son’s death at school

Japheal Findlay mother of Nathaniel Joseph Findlay, wants to see the footage from the school where he son reportedly died after suffering a seizure.
Japheal Findlay mother of Nathaniel Joseph Findlay, wants to see the footage from the school where he son reportedly died after suffering a seizure.

(Trinidad Guardian) The griev­ing moth­er of the eight-year-old Nathaniel Find­ley, who died af­ter suf­fer­ing a seizure at his Pri­ma­ry School on Mon­day, is call­ing for a full in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to his death.

Japheal Find­ley is query­ing claims that her son had pre­vi­ous­ly suf­fered seizures and wants to re­view school footage to re­fute ru­mours that her son’s seizure may have been caused by some ex­ter­nal con­tact.

“I not point­ing fin­gers to noth­ing I don’t know. I sim­ply ask two of the teach­ers to tell the prin­ci­pal I want to see footage. Let me see no­body didn’t hit my child. Let me see that he re­al­ly froth up and fall on the ground or some­thing let me be com­fort­able,” said Find­ley, who stat­ed her son did not have a his­to­ry of suf­fer­ing seizures.

“My child nev­er had a his­to­ry of seizures. Nev­er in his life, he had a his­to­ry of seizures. I liv­ing San­gre Grande for more than two years now. Nev­er been ad­mit­ted to the hos­pi­tal for any kind of thing like that. Nev­er, he nev­er had seizures be­fore.”

The school claimed that Nathaniel had in­deed suf­fered a seizure, ac­com­pa­nied by vom­it­ing three weeks ago, but his moth­er re­fut­ed the claim that he suf­fered a seizure then.

“Nathaniel had vom­it­ed the oth­er day in school where he start­ed to vom­it right and they say he fell on the ground. They call me and told me he was un­con­scious. It was like around some time af­ter 9 am and by the time I get to the school—they had him ly­ing down on the ground, there was some vom­it on (the col­lar of) his shirt,” she said, “He was up nor­mal. So I don’t know if they us­ing that to say my child suf­fered seizures. It have no records of noth­ing with my child get­ting a seizure be­fore. That is not true. I don’t know why they keep do­ing it.”

Find­ley said she was con­tact­ed by the school at 2.58 pm, on Mon­day ask­ing her to come to the school as Nathaniel had col­lapsed. She ar­rived at the school at 3.40 pm, by that time some wit­ness­es claimed Nathaniel had been on the ground for an hour.

Find­ley was dis­mayed that her son had been on the ground for so long.

“I start to bawl and ask them if they didn’t call an am­bu­lance, they say they try they didn’t get no am­bu­lance they try fire ser­vice. But this is what I’m say­ing the war­den of­fice out the road al­ways have an am­bu­lance park in front of it,’ said Find­ley, who al­so asked why teach­ers did not at­tempt to car­ry the boy to the hos­pi­tal in one of their cars.

School pol­i­cy dic­tates that school of­fi­cials can­not take chil­dren out of the com­pound in a med­ical emer­gency with­out the ap­proval of the par­ent.

Nic­hole Van­der­pool, pres­i­dent of the Seizure Aware­ness Foun­da­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go (SAFTT) said she was sad­dened by the sit­u­a­tion as the tragedy had oc­curred in seizure aware­ness month, which is com­mem­o­rat­ed in No­vem­ber.

She said the time tak­en to get Nathaniel med­ical treat­ment was far too de­layed. She, how­ev­er, said it was pos­si­ble that Nathaniel could have suf­fered from epilep­sy but had not been of­fi­cial­ly di­ag­nosed.

Van­der­pool ex­plained that a full test for epilep­sy would on­ly be done af­ter the sec­ond oc­cur­rence of a seizure out­side of a 24 hour pe­ri­od. This meant had the in­ci­dent three weeks ago been classed as a seizure, Nathaniel would have been test­ed for epilep­sy had he sur­vived his col­lapse on Mon­day.