A six-year-old girl who went on a school trip to a pumpkin patch spent two hours terrified and alone there after the group left without her.
Cianni Allen wandered around the Tuttle Orchards patch in Greenfield, Indiana, while her teachers and classmates got on a bus that took then 26 miles back to Christel House Academy West.
‘I was scared,’ said Cianni.
‘When I was by myself, I said, “Where’s my teacher?” And I looked in the apple orchard and the pumpkin orchard.’
The girl said a woman eventually asked her what was wrong, and that she replied, ‘My school is missing.’
Orchard staff took Cianni to their office and contacted her school.
School staff then called the girl’s emergency contact, her grandmother. A teacher went to pick up Cianni while her mother, Dearra Allen, 33, rushed to the school.
The class left the pumpkin patch at 2pm and arrived at the school at 2.45pm, but Cianni did not return until 4.30pm, according to her mom.
‘Cianni was by herself for almost two hours. She knows about stranger danger. We had just gone over what to do if a stranger approaches, and then this happens,’ Dearra said.
‘I thought they turned right back around to get her, but she was sitting there alone for two hours. Anything could have happened to her. Someone could have snatched her.’
When reunited, Dearra said her daughter ‘just hugged her and cried’.
As Cianni was held by her mom, her father spoke with the principal and was ‘furious’.
‘Her teacher was there, saying, “I did a head count, and everyone was accounted for. I didn’t see Cianni or her pumpkin, so I thought she was already on the bus,”‘ Dearra explained.
‘How do you leave an entire child behind and not realize it?’
The mother said the school’s apologies do not cut it, and that she has spoken with four lawyers as well as the media.
‘This is a six-year-old,’ Dearra said. ‘Anything could have happened to her, and I’m going to make sure people know that.’
Asked if she thought she would ever see her parents again, Cianni said: ‘No.’
She added that the incident made her feel ‘sad’.
The October 16 episode is not the first incident as Halloween approaches to go awry.
Just days before, two teenage boys were fatally run over in freak accidents on separate tractor-pulled haunted hayrides.
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