A babysitter has been arrested after her abuse of a two-year-old boy was exposed by a Ring security camera in his family’s home.
The child’s mother, Kristla Holmes, had gone to work leaving the boy in the care of Chantal Mason, a trusted friend she was paying to look after him. But she was horrified when she checked the Ring footage from her home in Newburgh in upstate New York, and saw Mason throwing the sobbing child on his back and slapping him. CBS News New York reported Mason was yelling”Be quiet” and “Lay your ass down.”
The camera also caught Mason resting her foot on the boy’s head as she lay on the couch.
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Ms Holmes said the abuse and breach of trust served as a warning for parents: “You can’t trust nobody. You cannot trust your kids’ godparents. You can’t trust a long friend.
“Watch your own kids. Protect your own kids.”
Holmes described Mason as a family friend of 15 years who had been in charge of watching her kids before, someone she would have never suspected of hurting her children. But that changed when she saw the damning footage from the security camera
“She told me that he just woke up, she fed him, and he was laying on the couch watching TV,” Ms Holmes said. “When I checked the camera, that’s not what he was doing. He was hysterically crying.”
She said she rushed home to get her child to safety and call police, who arrested Mason for endangering the welfare of a child. Officials said the slapping went on for longer than the short clip aired by TV stations.
Mason was booked at the Orange County Jail, in Goshen, following the incident on Monday, and released on Tuesday. She could not be reached for comment.
