Two day care workers charged for starting toddler ‘Fight Club’ that went viral
Two day care workers at the Adventure Learning Center in St. Louis, Missouri, have been charged for allegedly making 3 and 4 year old children beat each other up in what is being compared to the 1999 movie, Fight Club.
According to the St. Louis Post Dispatch, Monday, Mickala Guliford, 28, and Tena N. Dailey, 22, were charged with first-degree endangering the welfare of a child creating a substantial risk.
Last month, a disturbing video surfaced that showed preschool children pummeling each other while the adults supervising them cheered them on. The two women allegedly instigated the 35-minute brawl to entertain the children on a day when the facility’s heater broke in December of 2016.
The clip was filmed through a classroom window on an iPad by the 10-year-old brother of one of the victims but was just recently made public. In it, you can see the child crying after reportedly enduring three fights.
“He doesn’t understand why his friends were fighting him,” Nicole Merseal, the mother of one of the kids told the local news station. “He got beat up by his best friend. And it was on his fourth birthday.”
Guliford and Dailey are scheduled to appear in court on December 3rd, which is almost two years to the day since court documents say they, “encouraged and directed the children to engage in fistfights with each other.”
“I am so very thankful that my 10-year-old realized that it was wrong,” Merseal said in reference to her eldest child who bravely filmed the incident and texted it to her.
But her younger son, who left that fight with a black eye, red marks and swelling on his face, is still traumatized by the experience. Merseal says one day as she was driving him to a new day care center, the 4-year-old, “asked me in the car if they were gonna make him fight.”
She has since filed a lawsuit and her lawyer, Jennifer Hansen, said in an email that, “Ms. Merseal is humbled by the strong support of the St. Louis community in wanting justice for the kids at Adventure Learning Center who were forced to fight each other that day.”
