Hurts even to look: Boys, five and seven, suffer horrific sunburns in daycare

Two young Oklahoma brothers, one five, the other seven, are recovering in a Texas hospital’s burn unit after suffering horrific sunburns at a daycare center.

“They didn’t put no sunscreen on them and no shirt and when I asked them about it, they claimed they were out of sunscreen and that they told the kids to put on their shirts, but they didn’t want to leave them on,” Shaunna Broadway told NewsOn6 in Oklahoma.

The name of the day care center? The Happiness Is A Learning Center.

Really.

The boys — Conner, seven, and Trey, five — were crying in pain when they got home Friday. Huge, painful blisters erupted on their backs and shoulders.

“Then things got worse, especially with my oldest one. He started to started to complain of chest pains and not being able to breathe and his chest started swelling,” she said.

Ten minutes after bringing the boys to the local hospital in Tulsa, officials there had the brothers medi vac’d to the burn center at Shriner’s Hospital in Galveston, Texas.

“To think that a kid could get that burned in the care of a daycare, I have no words,” Broadway said. “It’s just a lot because it’s just me. I’m trying to be strong for them.”

“Right’s right, and wrong’s wrong, and there’s no excuse for this,” Shaunna told NewsOn6.

“I’m a single parent, and I do all I can. I work Monday through Friday, and they have to go to daycare. I don’t have the luxury to just have somebody that I can just have watch them outside daycare.”

A GoFundMe page has been set up to help her with expenses.

The site says:

The boys “were taken on a field trip while at daycare to a splash pad. It was a sunny day in Oklahoma, and the state was under a heat warning, as the heat index approached 110 degrees.

“The day care workers in charge of the boys put not one drop of sunscreen on the boys during the hours they were outside with no shirts on. Conner suffered 2nd and 3rd degree burns, while Trey suffered 2nd degree burns.”

Vinita, Oklahoma cops and child welfare officials are investigating.

The day care has been cited 19 times by the state Department of Human Services in the past year for various violations.

Officials at the center declined comment.

John A. Oswald is editor-at-large at Metro and can be found on Twitter@nyc_oz.
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