4-year-old swallowed pills at kindergarten and was hospitalized. Charges brought against teachers

The District Prosecutor’s Office in Lubin is investigating the exposure of a four-year-old child at one of Lubin’s kindergartens on August 28, 2024, through the fault of the facility’s staff, to a direct danger of loss of life or suffering serious bodily harm. This was connected with the boy swallowing an undetermined number of psychoactive pills, which caused him to faint and then suffer a collapse constituting an illness that posed a real threat to his life.

– As established, including on the basis of surveillance footage, children playing after 3:00 p.m. in the green areas adjacent to the kindergarten found a blister pack of pills by the fence. Several children picked it up from the ground – reports prosecutor Liliana Łukasiewicz, press spokesperson for the District Prosecutor’s Office in Legnica. – At one point, when the blister pack was in the hands of the injured four-year-old, he swallowed an undetermined number of pills.

Ultimately, one of the two teachers caring for the children noticed the blister pack in the boy’s hand, took it away from him and threw the packaging into a trash bin.

Prosecutor: – When the boy’s mother picked him up from the kindergarten after 4:00 p.m., and he was unsteady on his feet, had slurred speech and was not communicating coherently, the kindergarten teachers did not tell his mother that the child might have swallowed pills.

An ambulance was called. The boy was taken to the hospital in Lubin. The spokesperson said:

Because it was impossible to determine what was wrong with the child, he was transported to the intensive care unit of a hospital in Wrocław. It was not until around 7:00 p.m. that the kindergarten provided information that the child might have taken medicines found in the playground and that they were psychoactive medicines.

An expert opinion in forensic medicine states that informing medical personnel about the circumstances in which the medicine was taken could have accelerated the initiation of emergency procedures, including gastric lavage and fluid therapy. The boy’s ingestion of the medicine did not cause organ damage; however, it caused a health disorder lasting several hours, in the form of an illness that posed a real threat to his life.

On March 17 and 19, 2025, charges were brought against two teachers who had been supervising the children in the playground. Investigators accused them of the following: “being persons who, due to their employment at this kindergarten as teachers and the actual entrustment of childcare to them, had a special duty of care toward the children, they exposed the four-year-old to a direct danger of loss of life or serious bodily harm through improper supervision, as a result of which the boy swallowed an undetermined number of psychoactive pills, causing increasing symptoms of impaired consciousness and respiratory failure that made intubation, mechanical ventilation and therapeutic fluid therapy necessary; this clinical condition corresponded to an illness that posed a real threat to life, and they also failed to inform the injured child’s mother and emergency medical personnel about the possibility that the boy had taken the medicine.”

(Illustrative photo).