In memoriam Tyji Chester, 7 years old
June 7, 2006 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
7-year-old Tyji Chester was found floating lifeless in a city swimming pool in West Baltimore. Tyji, who has autism and who was at school in a class with one other child, climbed a 10-foot fence to reach the pool. A teacher pulled him from the pool around noon and he was pronounced dead at 1:33 p.m., according to today’s Baltimore Sun.
Tyji’s drowning in a swimming pool comes not two weeks after 5-year old Korey Penwall drowned in a retention pool, on May 26th.
Not only was Tyji at school, but witnesses told his father that three other children helped him to climb the fence.
“Three other little kids put him over the fence,” Mr. Chester said. “He hang-dropped from the inside down. But the other little boys didn’t get in the pool. My son took his clothes off and jumped in the pool. They climbed over there, too. And when my son jumped into the water, and they saw that he couldn’t swim – they said he was splashing -the kids ran away.”
Police would not confirm those details last night and were awaiting an autopsy report from the state medical examiner’s office on the cause of the death, which appeared to have been a drowning.
The pool in which Tyji drowned is “less than 100 yards from Lafayette Elementary [Tyji's school] and adjacent to a Police Athletic League recreation center.” Tyji apparently slipped away during a kindergarten graduation assembly, when the school doors were open.
Like Charlie, Tyji is supposed to have a one-on-one aide with him at all times.
It goes without saying, someone was not doing their job.
At one school where I worked as an aide for a child in grade two (I’d worked with her in her home for a year and her parents fought the school board to get me into the school with her), I was expected to be one of the supervisors at recess and lunch hour.
That is unreasonable expectations, and the schools need to do something about it. How is an aide, who has been assigned to work 1:1 with a child, supposed to do his/her job properly when s/he is also expected to supervise 100-odd children?
Charlie has had many aides in his public school classrooms—it is no easy job, yet the aides often have the least amount of training and support. From Tyji’s father’s comments, it sounds like he was supposed to have his own 1:1 aide—-but who knows what other “duties” the aide was being asked to attend to.
I am just outraged and devistated over the lost of my grandson Tyji Chester. His death was sensless and should never have happened. There is no excuse for the aide to allow him to get away from her much less to be able to leave the school and lose his life. If we can’t trust the safety of our children to those that are suppose to be responsible for their saftey………then who can we trust. It is all just plain neligence! There is no getting around it!
Sheila, we feel your outrage and devastation for Tyji as much as we can, though not as much as you and your family—-it’s beyond terrible. Please let us know what the school’s response is—we will be following the news reports.
And we will be thinking of Tyji.