Petrolia woman charged for toddler’s near drowning

A Petrolia woman has been charged after the near drowning of a 20-month-old boy who fell into the water of a backyard pool at an unlicensed daycare in the Lambton County village.

Lambton provincial police said Paula Maness, 50, of Petrolia was charged Thursday with criminal negligence causing bodily harm in connection with the Jan. 24 incident.

Maness is scheduled to appear March 22 in a Sarnia court.

“I think it’s fitting,” said Gillian Burnett, the mother of toddler Waylon Saunders. “I hope the charges laid on her are forever going to imprint on her. I want her to remember this for the rest of her life because we sure will.”

Burnett added, “I want her to have time in jail.”

Waylon survived the incident and is now recovering at home. According to a post on the London Health Sciences Center website, Waylon was under the water for as approximately five minutes.

Burnett said Friday Waylon is “still doing wonderful.”

She was initially told by doctors there was a less than 10 per cent chance Waylon would survive. She was later told there was a chance he would be brain dead, but the boy woke up in hospital while his family was playing a video of his sister speaking.

She has said Waylon’s movement has been impacted, and there are still concerns about his speech and future development.

Burnett has also said Waylon and his older sister had only been going to the unlicensed private daycare in Petrolia for a few weeks before he was found in the pool. In Ontario, caregivers who look after five or fewer unrelated children do not have to be licensed.

Just before 3 pm that day, police and paramedics responded to a call about a child that had fallen into a pool at a home on Juniper Crescent in Petrolia, Lambton OPP said in a news release.

Waylon was rushed to Charlotte Eleanor Englehart Hospital of Bluewater Health in Petrolia, where doctors, nurses and other health-care professionals spent nearly three hours working to revive him before he was transferred to hospital in London.

After nearly two weeks at the Children’s Hospital in London, Waylon returned to his home in St. Clair Township,

Lambton OPP said officers with the Lambton County crime unit, under the direction of the OPP criminal investigation branch, laid the charge following an investigation.

A few days after the incident, staff with the Lambton County building services department inspected the site on Juniper Crescent and issued a report listing several deficiencies under Petrolia’s fencing and pools bylaw, as well as immediate fixes required at the property. In the days following the report, which was affixed to the front door of the home, temporary fencing was installed around the pool while other repairs had been started.

Burnett said she has an appointment next month with Sarnia-Lambton MPP Bob Bailey.

“We’re going to work together, hopefully, and try and figure out how to make a law or regulations on unlicensed day care more strict,” she said. “We’ve been brainstorming some ideas, and I’m really hoping that we can come up with something to ensure that the horrific thing that our family had to endure will never happen to another family.”

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