A Bronx girl whose friend poured boiling water on her head is recovering, according to reports.
Jamoneisha “Jamoni” Merritt, 11, told the New York Daily News that she left the hospital on Friday.
“I’m so great,” she said. “Now I’m dancing and listening to music,” she said.
Jamoni is still recovering, however, and she will likely miss the beginning of her 7th-grade classes.
“Her arm is still raw, it hasn’t healed yet ... [and she] can’t go outside in the sun,” said Ebony Merritt. “It’s going to take maybe about six months for all her color to come back in.”
A friend doused her with scalding water in an apparent prank-gone-wrong—a replica of the so-called “Hot Water Challenge” spreading on YouTube.
Aniya Grant Stuart, 12, was taken into custody after the incident. Aniya also reportedly attempted to kill herself in the aftermath.
Jamoni said that she went to sleep at friend’s house on Aug. 7, and was woken up burning from the water.
“I was screaming because it burned, it burned, it burned, it burned,” she said. “They were saying, stop yelling and bugging,” Jamoni recalled of what the other girls told her.
Her mother says the three should be arrested.
“The mother is just as involved as the other kids,” Ebony Merritt told the Daily News. “This happened at 4 a.m. but they didn’t come to my house until 5:30. That means she was there for an hour and a half while they were trying to cover their tracks.”
“She doesn’t understand why they did that to her. She thought they were her friends,” Merritt told NY1. “I was told that they didn’t like her. And they just been bullying her.”
The mother added that bullies have often picked on her.
“She’s very sad. She’s emotionally messed up. She doesn’t understand why they did that to her,” she said.
Shernett Panton, Aniya’s mother, however, said that the girls “always prank each other.”
“My daughter was sleeping and Jamoni poured cold water on Aniya. My daughter was like, ”OK, if you’re going to do a prank on me, I’m going to prank you back,“ she said. ”But my daughter—I don’t know what she was thinking—boiled hot water and poured it on Jamoni’s face.”
“What she did was really wrong, but it’s too much right now. My daughter is 12. Everybody makes mistakes.”
A GoFundMe page was set up to help the family cover the ongoing medical costs.
In late July, an 8-year-old Florida girl died after she drank boiling water from a straw after she and her cousin watched a similar video on YouTube, The Associated Press has reported.
