The frightening abduction of the six-year-old girl from her school on Tuesday seemingly could have been prevented, according to the account of the child’s mother. Nichola Barrett-Glasgow found out her daughter was taken after arriving at the St Thomas More Preparatory School in Clarendon with her husband.
Barrett-Glasgow, speaking out about what she believes went wrong with Nationwide News, shared that the school’s security guard witnessed the kidnapping. The abduction could have been foiled had he done something, but he simply watched the man leave the compound with the girl.
According to Barrett-Glasgow, she and her husband had just returned from Kingston and went straight to the school, as they usually do, to pick up their daughter. Nothing seemed unusual at first. She went to the security guard, as she normally would, and asked for her child. That was when she was told that “someone had already picked her up.”
“We usually pick her up from school, and he [the security] saw that there was this anomaly, because the child did not have her school bag, she did not have her lunch kit, and that should have really set off a red flag right away,” Barrett-Glasgow told Nationwide News.
She said the guard first said it was an elderly person with a bucket before later saying it was a man in his mid-thirties. Barrett-Glasgow said they went to her daughter’s classroom, and her daughter’s teacher handed her husband the backpack and lunch bag belonging to the little girl. The teacher thought she was still on the compound at the time. When the couple continued to seek answers, a child told them an angry man took her.
Later, Barrett-Glasgow heard her daughter’s accounts of what truly happened, which prompted her to believe that signs were present that should have raised concern. The six-year-old said she was playing on the compound when an unknown man entered the school and grabbed her. The child said she “lost her voice” when she was snatched by the stranger, making it difficult for her to scream.
She said the security guard reportedly saw the man heading up the road with the little girl, but did not question him or alert anyone at the school. She expressed disbelief at how easily the man walked away with the child.
The missing-child alert was issued to the public on Tuesday afternoon, circulating a photo of the girl in her school uniform. But Barrett-Glasgow says the police were not called until she and her husband arrived and began raising the alarm themselves.
When they asked the school to contact the authorities, she says they were told that the school’s landline phone was down. While her husband went to the police station to make the report, she stayed behind and searched. She went searching for her child in the town centre and showed everyone she came across a picture of her daughter, asking if they had seen her.
The little girl was later saved by Clarendon councillor Scean Barnswell, who intercepted the man and the child along the Bustamante Highway.