‘How does this happen?’
2 charged for abandoning girl
At a busy Queens intersection, Mishka Peart saw the 6-year-old girl, with a surgical mask on her face, a white garbage bag in one hand and a black, reusable bag in the other.
The girl — who gave her name as Emma — was abandoned by her mother and her mother’s boyfriend, say police.
“How does this happen?” Peart said on Tuesday. “How is it that this woman has a daughter and leaves her like this?”
Emma’s mother, Patrice Chambers, 29, and Chambers’ boyfriend, Mark Pamphile, 28, residents of Central Islip in Suffolk County, were arrested and charged with child endangerment.
Peart, 30, encountered Emma on Monday morning as she turned onto 140th Ave. from Springfield Blvd. in Laurelton. Springfield Blvd. is a four-lane road at that intersection, busy enough to be guarded by a traffic light — not a place for a wandering 6-year-old girl.
The bags in the girl’s hands held her clothes — and she dropped them as she scurried across the intersection.
Peart stopped her car and motioned for the child to get her clothes. “Then, she ran to the sidewalk, and she kept looking at me,” she said.
“I asked her where she was going and she said, ‘I don’t know.’ I said, ‘Where are your parents?’ ”
“I don’t know,” the girl answered. “They drove off and left me.”
The little girl got into Peart’s car. Peart drove her to nearby Montbellier Park, where she found a pair of school safety agents, and told them what happened. The safety agents summoned officers from the 105th Precinct, and the police investigation began.
Police said Chambers and Pamphile kicked Emma out of their car in Laurelton at about 11:30 a.m. — and that they have video to prove it.
Later that day, Emma’s dad, Kermit Watson, 52, heard police bang on the front door of his apartment, near where Emma was dropped off.
Officers had questions about Emma, and an accusation, made by Chambers, that she had shown up with
Emma earlier in the morning and that Watson had turned them away.
“Are you crazy?” Watson replied. “That never happened.”
In fact, he said, Pamphile had texted him to say he and Chambers were coming by with Emma, but no one ever showed up — and Watson said doorbell video from his landlord, viewed by police, backed up his account.
Watson said he’s barely seen Emma since he and Chambers broke up about four years ago.
Chambers called recently and asked him to take Emma in because Suffolk County child welfare authorities were “harassing her,” Watson said.
Watson said he jumped at the chance to have Emma live with him, even though Chambers refused his request to have his name listed on her birth certificate.
Pamphile, he said, had taken control of Chambers’ life, fathering a child with her and looking to distance her from Emma and an older daughter, 11, who now lives with her own dad.
“He doesn’t want nobody around.” Watson said of Pamphile. “She doesn’t have a say.”
Pamphile explained himself to police, according to his statement to them, made public Tuesday in Queens Criminal Court: “These kids are a problem to me. This kid is her kid . ... This kid is not my kid, not my problem, not my responsibility.”
Emma is now living with relatives, authorities said.
Peart was especially hurt and puzzled by the incident because, she said, “I’m struggling to have a kid.” She said she and her husband have been trying for two years.
“I am just so confused as to how people can just leave their children on the street with garbage bags,” Peart said on video she recorded while Emma was in the back seat of her car.
She feels lucky that she changed up her daily exercise routine on Monday in a way that led her to find Emma in the busy intersection.
“I am mindblown. I am like in total shock,” she said. “It’s like God sent me.”