A 6-year-old autistic boy ran out of a Brooklyn school without anyone noticing and wound up on a nearby rooftop, where an off-duty cop grabbed him from the ledge.
“Thank God he found my son!” cried Asmaa Awawda, whose child, Ibrahim, attends P77K, a program for disabled kids inside PS 164 on 14th Avenue in Borough Park.
School officials refuse to explain why safety plans enacted citywide after the 2013 death of autistic boy Avonte Oquendo failed. The 14-year-old’s body turned up in the East River three months after he darted out of his Queens school.
The latest incident on Dec. 2 raises questions of whether Avonte’s Law, passed by the City Council, is sufficient to protect children with autism.
The Department of Education claims to have spent $5.5 million to put 21,000 door alarms in 1,200 schools, and to require training of school staff to monitor unlocked exits.
But Ibrahim was left unattended, no alarm sounded when he opened an exit door, no one caught him leaving, and staff didn’t realize he was gone.
“He could have fallen to his death,” said David Perecman, the lawyer for Avonte’s mother, Vanessa Fontaine, who settled with the city for $2.7 million.
Mona Davids, president of the New York City Parents Union, the advocacy group that pushed for Avonte’s Law, was even more direct.
“I think it’s clear that Chancellor Carmen Fariña and Mayor de Blasio don’t take ensuring the safety of our children seriously,” she said.
“The DOE opposed the law, and now that the law is passed the DOE is still not complying with it,” Davids added, noting complaints of inoperable and disabled alarms in multiple schools.
‘I told them my son can’t be left alone because he’s a runner.’
“They disable the alarms for their own convenience and they don’t seem to understand that kids can sneak out,” Davids charged.
Like Avonte’s mom, Awawda had warned the school that her overactive son, who has limited speech, needs constant supervision.
“I told them my son can’t be left alone because he’s a runner,” she said.
A series of missteps led to the near-tragedy, The Post learned.
First, a paraprofessional assigned to stay with Ibrahim all day left early. The school then put Ibrahim with a group of kids, where he was left unattended.
Ibrahim fled around 2:30 pm from a cafeteria door that opens onto busy 43rd Street. The exit had no camera to capture his escape.
A school bus arrived at 3 p.m.to take kids home. When school staff didn’t see Ibrahim, they assumed he was picked up by his mother and told the bus driver to leave without him.
Sensing something amiss, the driver called Ibrahim’s mom about 10 minutes later. Awawda was shocked.
“Where is my son?” she called to ask the school.
“We can’t find him,” a staffer finally admitted.
Awawda hailed a cab from her Bay Ridge home to search the neighborhood around the school. Ibrahim’s dad filed a missing person’s report at the 66th Precinct.
Several blocks away, Christian Lopez, 26, an off-duty officer in Brooklyn’s 70th Precinct, was in his fourth-floor apartment on 15th Avenue when his mother heard noises and saw a little boy in the hall trying to open doors.
Lopez spotted the boy heading up a flight of steps toward the roof and decided to check. The roof door was open and Ibrahim stood next to a fire-escape ladder, peering over a low ledge, he recalled.
Lopez grabbed the boy, called 911 and checked his phone, which had the missing-child alert. The parents raced to his building to find the young cop holding Ibrahim’s hand.
“They just started crying and hugging him and thanking me,” Lopez said.
Awawda wants to transfer Ibrahim after meeting last week with Principal Ebony Russell and an aide to Superintendent Arthur Fusco — who could not promise Ibrahim would not get out again.
‘This child left through a door with no alarm or a deactivated alarm that was not properly supervised.’
They told her, “It’s not something we can guarantee,” she said.
The parents’ lawyer, Elisa Hyman, will seek a hearing to ensure Ibrahim is kept safe in school.
“The number of mistakes is terrifying,” she said. “This child left through a door with no alarm or a deactivated alarm that was not properly supervised.”
Ibrahim’s special-education plan requires a full-time, one-to-one aide, Hyman added. “When the aide left, another should have been assigned. The school should also confirm parent pickups. It’s outrageous.”
A DOE spokeswoman did not answer questions, citing an investigation.
As The Post recently reported, complaints about unsupervised children who went missing from schools, buses and field trips or were left unattended skyrocketed to 457 last year — nearly twice the 279 cases reported in 2014, according to the Special Commissioner of Investigation for city schools.
“In this instance and others I’ve seen, teachers, administrators and aides still take a laissez-faire attitude,” Perecman said.
“I don’t think they realize how serious their responsibility is when it comes to watching special-needs children.”