Handing charges out like candy, prosecutors on Thursday accused five daycare workers of child abuse after video of one of them wearing a creepy mask and scaring tots at a Mississippi day care center went viral. Four of the former employees of Lil’ Blessings Child Care and Learning Center in Hamilton were each charged with three counts of felony child abuse; a fifth was hit with misdemeanor charges of failure to report abuse by a mandatory reporter and simple assault. The indictments stem from a trio of videos shared widely across social media on Oct. 5 that showed young children crying, screaming, and trying to run away from a female employee creeping around in a mask similar to the one worn in the Scream horror films. “It made me sick at my stomach to think of the terror those kids were enduring,” Monroe County Sheriff Kevin Crook said in an Oct. 6 Facebook post. “It still does.” The daycare’s owner, Sheila Sanders, confirmed to the Monroe Journal the same day that the employees who were directly involved had been terminated.
