A mother has reported to the Mossos d’Esquadra that her five-year-old son, temporarily taken in by the Generalitat, almost drowned on the Cavaió beach in the municipality of Arenys de Mar, during an excursion of which she had not been informed. The boy was participating in an outing with eleven other supervised minors, led by two instructors “on a day with a lot of waves,” according to one of the educators’ own account.
This is stated in the medical report, part of which is in the possession of this newspaper. The patient was transferred to the Mataró hospital and from there to the Badalona hospital. The events, which Crónica Global and Ràdio Arenys reported at the time, occurred on August 17. The monitor told the doctors that they lost sight of him for a few seconds and a wave carried him away until he was rescued, “unconscious and without requiring resuscitation maneuvers.”
Once on the shore, the boy vomited. At the Mataró hospital it was considered that he had acidosis (too much acid in the body’s fluids) and difficulty breathing, in addition to possible acute pulmonary edema, as reflected in an x-ray. His condition recommended transfer to the Germans Trias i Pujol hospital, where he was admitted “under continuous cardiorespiratory monitoring” and ended up in the ICU for four days, two in an induced coma.
Five hours after admission, he had a fever of 38.5 degrees. His conditions worsened and he was induced into a coma and intubated. This was necessary so that he could better adapt to mechanical ventilation, even though his hypoxemia, or low level of oxygen in the blood, had not been aggravated. “After 48 hours, extubation occurred without incident.” A nasogastric tube was later removed. He was discharged on the fourth day.
The accident on the beach occurred just a month after the Generalitat took charge of him, when he was surprised, despite his young age, wandering alone on a street in Barcelona. A Mossos patrol managed to get him to tell them where he lived, in a nearby hostel. There they discovered that his mother had gone to work and she had to leave him in the care of someone she trusted who could not or did not know how to honor that distinction.
The certificate, which included a description of the room shared by mother and son, was submitted to the General Directorate of Child Care and Adolescence (DGAIA) of the Generalitat, as in all cases of children and minors presumed to be abandoned . The DGAIA took charge of him and initiated a case of temporary fostering of the child, who in the meantime can be visited regularly by his mother.
From there the versions of the events are radically different, depending on the reporting sources. All parties, however, agree that the administration has the power to assume custody of the minor without the intervention of a judge. Her mother denounces that she was separated from her son due to alleged negligence, those indirectly responsible for another even greater negligence that could have had tragic consequences.
This woman has very few resources and has a hard time expressing herself. With the help of an anti-bullying platform and an association of Moroccan citizens, who help her selflessly, she has found a lawyer. Her hope is that the complaint she previously filed at a Mossos d’Esquadra police station will soon reach a court so that justice can finally take action on the matter.