Newsday, a daily newspaper serving Long Island and New York City, said yesterday that one of its telemarketers alerted police to two children left at home without adults.
The telemarketer, who worked for Cambridge Corp., Farmingdale, NY, was making calls to sell subscriptions. During one call she encountered a 5-year-old girl who said her mother wasn't home, her father was dead and that the only other person present in the house was “her baby,” her 1-year-old brother, according to Newsday.
“I said, 'Where is your baby?' and she said, 'My baby is on the floor,'” Anna Ardito, 35, the telemarketer who made the call, told Newsday.
According to Newsday, Ardito called 911 and reported the situation to authorities. Police arrived a short time later to find the two children safe. The mother arrived 90 minutes after Ardito made the call. Police arrested the mother on charges of endangering the welfare of a child, a misdemeanor, and turned the children over to a relative, Newsday said.
The incident was the second time recently that telemarketers were credited in the news with providing assistance in an emergency. In June, the news service Reuters reported that a Colombian hiker was stuck in an Andes mountains blizzard in May and discovered that his cell phone had run out of prepaid minutes. The man was rescued after he received a call from a telemarketer offering to sell him more minutes for his phone, Reuters reported.
