Georgia Woman Accused Of Abandoning Her 2-Year-Old Outside Of A Fast Food Restaurant

A Georgia woman is accused of abandoning her crying toddler in the bushes of a Macon fast-food restaurant, the Macon Telegraph is reporting.

Ibrahim Oudat, owner of Sharks Fish and Chicken, said an employee alerted him to seeing someone pull into the restaurant’s parking lot, grab something out of the back seat of her car, and then pull away at about 7:30 p.m. Sunday night.

Oudat and the employee went out to investigate. What they found shocked them: a sobbing 2-year-old.

“Just crazy, man. I was shocked. He was crying, he was looking around for some help, so I came back, I hugged him.”

Valita Taylor, who works at the restaurant, tells WMAZ that she had overheard the mother admitting to abandoning the 2-year-old.

“I don’t know how deep a person has to be going through some stuff to put their kid out on the dark street and ride off and leave them and not think anything about it.”

The restaurant owner took the crying, abandoned toddler inside and called police. While police were there investigating, the mother returned, this time with the child’s grandmother.

“They came back, zooming in here and they were shocked to see four police cars already here.”

The child’s grandmother was, according to a restaurant employee, distraught at the situation, and apparently had urged her daughter to go back to the restaurant to reclaim her child. She admitted to police that the abandoned child was hers.

Police arrested 23-year-old Kalandra Di’Shaun Hightower and charged her with cruelty to children.

Workers from Georgia’s Department of Family and Children Services placed the toddler into the care of his grandmother.

Oudat says that, for him, the hardest part of the series of events was watching the images of the mother abandon her toddler, and watching him burst into tears as she pulled away, on the restaurant’s security cameras.

“This is not right. We work so hard for our children. If you don’t want no babies, don’t make no babies… It’s everything in God’s hand. If I hadn’t been there, if he wasn’t kidnapped, he would have been hit by anyone coming into the parking lot. That boy could have gotten killed. He was lucky.”

Hightower is currently jailed on an $8,450 bond. If she makes bond, she won’t be allowed to have a weapon or to have any contact with any of her children, including the toddler she allegedly abandoned at a fast food restaurant.

[Images courtesy of: WMAZ]