4-Year-Old Brings Crack Cocaine Vials From Daycare Center Mistaking Them For ‘Teeth’

A four-year-old girl had to be rushed into the emergency care after it was suspected she had swallowed what she thought to be another girl’s tooth, but was actually a little capsule filled with crack cocaine.

Sabrina Straker, the mother of the victim, told NBC New York her daughter had come home from Lil Inventors Child Care, located on Andrews Avenue in the Fordham Manor, Bronx, carrying several small clear vials containing a white powdered substance. She told Straker her classmate had given them to her, telling her they were his teeth.

“I look at it, and it’s not one piece… it’s two smaller pieces,” she said. “[I thought], OK, clearly this is not a tooth.”

Straker grew suspicious of what was inside the vials and decided to take them to a local police station to get evaluated.

"This can't be what I think it is," Straker said she thought at the time. "How did this get in the daycare?"

What she discovered, left her shocked. Narcotics detectives determined the substance the vials contained crack cocaine. That was also when the victim’s mother discovered her daughter was behaving strangely.

“We kept saying, ‘Why are you so hyper today, Serenity? Normally, you think she has a lot of sugar or something like that at school,” Straker said.

After being asked by her mother, the four-year-old admitted she had put one of the vials in her mouth at the daycare center but immediately spat it out. The victim was rushed to the hospital, where she tested positive for the drug.

“She could have died if she ingested this," Straker said. "I was furious.”

Although her daughter recovered from the incident, Straker said she hadn’t taken her back to the daycare center, which she added, should be shut down.

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

New York Police Department was investigating the incident and also looking into the child who handed over the vials of cocaine to the victim.

Yvette Joseph, the director at the Little Inventors Day Care, told CW-affiliated Pix11 someone had thrown the vials of drugs over the fence and into the daycare facility and that was how they ended up in the hands of the children.

“We checked our center thoroughly and all of the children are safe," Joseph said.