Days after parents of a 3-year-old girl said they daughter was alone and locked inside a Wallingford daycare, police said the situation is alarming, but not criminal.
Tonight, the daycare will be holding a meeting for parents to discuss what happened Tuesday.
Bernadette Sorbo, the mother of 3-year-old Aubrie, said her daughter is picked up at 6 p.m. every day, but the doors were locked and the building appeared to be closed when Aubrie’s dad went to pick her up at YMCA's Learning Community at Choate Rosemary Hall Tuesday, so he called Sorbo to get a code to enter the building.
Sorbo said she was only a few minutes away when she received the calls so she drove to the daycare and the pair found their daughter in the bathroom, covered in feces.
"We found our daughter in the toilet and she was covered in her own feces with nobody around," "I got her off the potty. I wiped her down and cleaned her off and we went over to the cubby."
Then the parents called police.
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Wallingford Police said they were dispatched to the YMCA's Learning Community at 333 Christian St. at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday for a welfare check. When they arrived, they found the little girl and her mother in their vehicle.
The father said no employees were at the daycare when he arrived, but the lights were on and he saw his daughter's coat and lunch bag inside.
The daycare reported the incident to the Connecticut Office of Early Childhood a day later and the agency is investigating.
Sean Doherty, the executive director of the Wallingford YMCA, told NBC Connecticut their mission is "to promote children's emotional, social, physical and intellectual development while meeting the needs of families. We believe in the core values of caring, honesty, respect and responsibility. We've been in communication with our parent community since this incident and have conducted an immediate and thorough investigation to prevent an incident like this from occurring again."
Police said they determined there was a breakdown in internal procedures and the child was not intentionally left behind.
"While the situation is one of an alarming nature, it does not rise to the level of criminal conduct," Wallingford police said in a news release.
The meeting will be held at 6 p.m. Friday at the daycare and parents are invited to discuss this, or any other concerns they have.
