Court, law, law, justice – illustrative photo
Chomutov – A witness who worked as a teacher's assistant in a kindergarten in Klášterec nad Ohří resigned because of the behavior of the accused trio of female teachers there. She said this today at the next meeting of the district court in Chomutov. The State Prosecutor's Office accuses the teacher of disproportionately rude behavior towards children. The defendants are for the offense of endangering the upbringing of a child. The teachers, through their defense attorneys, denied that they harmed the children at the last hearing. The judge adjourned the hearing to April 3, when she will hear additional witnesses. Due to the long testimony of the assistant, the questioning of another witness had to be postponed today.
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According to the indictment, the women committed their actions mainly against children with various disabilities and intentionally endangered their intellectual and emotional development. For example, one of them gave the children tasks they could not complete, and when they did not complete them, made them sit still so they could not play, the indictment states. According to the prosecutor's office, a teacher dipped the children's heads in cold water in the bathroom of the kindergarten, another, according to the indictment, forced the children to eat, and when they did not want to eat, she forced them to eat, for example, apple peels. The case became public more than three years ago, after which the police started investigating it at the instigation of the parents of one of the children.
“In the beginning, everything seemed to be normal, after a while things happened there that I didn't see,” said the witness today. She added that she had encountered female teachers hitting children across the ankles with their shoes, in one case a child was forced to eat until he vomited. She quit her job after her client, whom she was assisting, bit his lip when one of the defendants allegedly slipped on him causing him to hit the furniture. The witness further said that no one explained to her how to deal with a child in custody. Inspections went to the kindergarten, during which, according to the assistant, the defendants treated the children as they should, i.e. they did not play with them or force them to eat, etc. “The children reacted to the teachers' behavior by yelling or getting angry,” said the assistant. At the same time, however, she stated that the child she was supposed to help did not accept her very much and, on the contrary, gravitated towards one of the defendants.
The witness's questioning lasted over two hours. The defense attorneys presented several pieces of evidence to the court, including photographs. One of them showed a witness coming out of a bakery and a lone child. The witness said she was allowed to go get a snack and the children were being watched by one of the accused teachers. After the meeting, the defendants and their lawyers did not want to comment on the process.
State attorney Iveta Přecechtělová proposed suspended sentences and a ban on activity for all three in the indictment. The representative of the victims, Lucie Hrdá, suggested reclassifying the case as the crime of abuse of a trusted person.
