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Brooklyn Child Attacked By Rats While He Slept
By
Ben Yakas
Published Sep 14, 2014
Modified Sep 15, 2014
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By
Ben Yakas
Published Sep 14, 2014
Modified Sep 15, 2014
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A Brooklyn mom says that her three-and-a-half year old son is traumatized after he was bitten by at least one rat in his bed in Bedford-Stuyvesant. "There was blood all over his pillow," said Marilyn Abreu told NBC.
Abreu found her son, Nathaniel, with open wounds across his face, neck and feet. She believes a rat, or possibly multiple rats, bit him on the night of August 21st. "It wasn't no scratches, it was the actual teeth," she said. Doctors at two hospitals examined him and agreed that the marks appeared to be rat bites.
To make matters worse, Nathaniel is a special-needs child who almost never speaks, and probably couldn't cry out for help when he was attacked: "I'm right here in the next room, and I didn't hear nothing. That's what hurts me most."
The family's apartment building is above a closed subway entrance that has been infested with rats for years; Abreu thinks the rats have been chewing through their walls. Other neighbors have complained about the rat infestation as well. The building manager, Wavecrest Management, brought in exterminators after the incident, but the family fears the rats are still there.
Abreu told NBC she still hears rats in the walls and Nathaniel is afraid to go to sleep. We have no doubt that if a rat crawled all over our face, let alone bit us in bed, we wouldn't be able to sleep either.
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Bedford-Stuyvesant
biting
brooklyn
nightmares
rats
vermin
Ben Yakas
Ben Yakas is a former Gothamist reporter.
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