Portsmouth, Va. - One Portsmouth mother says she is afraid of losing her children after a cooking lesson left burns all over her two-year-old daughter, Chloe's, face.
"You might as well commit me. If they take my child away from me, you might as well commit me. Because this is the reason I wake up every day. This is my life right here," Kelly Jones told Newschannel 3 on Thursday.
She says her mother, Marjorie Jones, was teaching her 9-year-old son how to cook bacon. " He took the top off the bacon, off the pan, and put it inside the sink. Somehow he hit his knee up against the stove and for some reason it slipped off into the floor and hit his foot and her face," she says.
She didn't take her kids to the hospital, which is why police say, they arrested the two women.
We asked her if she considered it to be a serious injury, and Kelly responded,
"No. I mean,if it would have blistered and if she would have acted differently or anything like that." I made sure she was normal. I made sure she had no temperature. She didn`t cry for five minutes."
She says she was arrested because someone anonymously tipped the police station, and told them she deliberately burned the daughter.
"I by no means ever would ever do anything to my children. Now I have this label and it tears me up. I`m shaking now. It tears me up," she says.
Kelly says she eventually did take her daughter to the hospital, where doctors told her, they were fine.
But now, she has regrets, and is praying she can keep her kids.
"OK I do admit, I probably should have directly took her. But it didn`t blister, it didn`t do nothing. I cried for two days. Because I have this reputation that I am a child abuser. I have to go to court. I have to worry about losing my child over an accident," she says.
Both women are charged with child abuse and neglect, and will be in court next week.
