NURSERY boss Laura Pettitt dealt with crying non-white children by telling them they “shouldn’t even be in this country,” Croydon Crown Court heard yesterday.
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“Laura would be racist towards the kids and call them names like Joe Darkie,” Chloe Neely, an assistant at the Little Stars Nursery in Bromley, told the court.
“When they were crying and upset she said things like, ‘You shouldn’t even be in this country’.”
Pettitt is in court on charges of child cruelty and is alleged to have used violence against the children in her care.
“She used to try to make the babies sleep all the time,” Neely told the court.
“She would cover their faces with a blanket and hold it over them so they couldn’t breathe.
“One boy was really upset and couldn’t get comfortable. Laura got really annoyed that he was crying. She threw him at the sofa. She just threw him. He hit his face. It left a big graze.”
Neely’s colleague, Nicola Fiddler, told the court:
“One day when the babies were going to sleep they were all on mats by the sofa.
“One little boy lifted his head up to look around. Laura used her foot on his head to lay it back down on the mat.”
Earlier, the court heard that Pettitt once forced a boy to eat his own sick.
“She carried on feeding him the vomit that had fallen out and came into the collection trough of the bib he was wearing,” prosecutor Tana Adkin told the court.
Pettitt, of Beckenham, denies child cruelty and says the allegations against her were made because she is a lesbian. The trial continues.
