'This can't be what I think it is': 4-year-old gives mother crack cocaine that she got at daycare

A 4-year-old went home with vials of crack cocaine from a Bronx daycare that were similar in appearance to the cocaine in this photo from a bust in Miami. (Photo: Steve Starr/Corbis/via Getty Images)
A 4-year-old went home with vials of crack cocaine from a Bronx daycare that were similar in appearance to the cocaine in this photo from a bust in Miami. (Photo: Steve Starr/Corbis/via Getty Images)

Trusting others to take care of your child while you are at work or taking care of other responsibilities is a leap of faith, especially if your child is preschool age. Respected teachers and teacher’s aides have proved themselves to be more than competent; however, sometimes incidents arise. One Bronx mother wants her child’s daycare closed after a shocking incident occurred involving drugs.

According to Sabrina Straker, her 4-year-old daughter, Serenity, came home from daycare and showed her mother something another child gave her. He called the small capsules his “teeth,” and Serenity apparently put a capsule in her mouth but did not swallow it. Serenity then brought her mother more of the “teeth,” which had a crystal-like compound inside of them. Straker said that they looked like pebbles.

“This can’t be what I’m thinking it is,” Straker told PIX11 that she’d thought at the time. “How did this get in the daycare?”

Straker took the substance to the 46th Precinct, where narcotics detectives ran a test on the capsules. They confirmed that it was crack cocaine.

Serenity was taken to the hospital, where she tested positive for the drug. “She couldn’t sit down; she was beyond bouncy, very loquacious, just all over the place, literally, talking to herself, looking in the mirror, saying she sees three of herself. Once they did the urine test, it came back positive that she had cocaine in her system,” Straker said.

Straker said her daughter could have died if she had ingested the drug. “I was furious,” she added, and now she wants the daycare, Lil Inventors Child Care, located on Andrews Avenue in the Bronx, to be shut down.

“No one was watching the children. There are 15 kids in the room with two teachers and two aides — where were they when this was going on?”

The director of the daycare facility, Yvette Joseph, offered an explanation for the incident, suggesting to PIX11 that someone had thrown the drugs over the fence, perhaps in an attempt to get rid of them, and one of the children picked them up. “We checked our center thoroughly, and all the children are safe,” she told the outlet. According to Lil Inventors Child Care’s website, the daycare provides programs for children from the age of 3 months to 12 years old.

Police are investigating the incident as a case of child endangerment.

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle: