Stanley Frederique, 34, allegedly abandoned his daughter, Nataleigh, 3, inside a fast-food restaurant around 11:30 p.m. on Saturday, police said. The dad bought his child a footlong sub and left her, and he didn’t remember his little girl until the next day.
Surveillance video from the shop next to the Subway showed the girl holding her father’s hand on street as he chatted with a couple of people. Then, he walked her inside, bought her a turkey sub and then left without his child, according to the New York Times. A witness said the father ordered the girl to stay when she cried and ran after him.
The youngster who had been calm in the restaurant caught the attention of a customer, Michaela Warnsley of Harlem who is a child welfare worker. “I asked her, ‘Where’s your mommy and daddy?’ and she pointed to the [street] corner,” Warnsley told the New York Post.
Michaela Warnsley told the Gothamist that she took Natalie to the police: “Virtually everything [Natalie] said turned out to be true, from her full name, to her borough and father’s name, and how she’d described his outfit that night. For a three-year-old, she was incredibly brave and brilliant.”
Police issued an alert to try to locate Natalie’s family and to locate Frederique and the child was taken to the hospital.
Fredrique woke up from a drunken sleep near Battery Park on Sunday morning, he told the police. He remembered that he had been drinking, but not much else, according to officials.
He didn’t know what he had done until he called the girl’s mother, Marleana Neeper, from a taxi at around 7:30 a.m., law enforcement sources said. The mother asked about their daughter and the man didn’t have an answer.
Mohammed Wasay who owns the laundry where Neeper works said, “Marleana had no clue her daughter was missing,” and the mother “could barely breathe.”
The cab driver hailed a traffic cop who transported Frederique to a police station in Brooklyn. The man admitted he lost his child and police charged him with child abandonment and reckless endangerment.
Police report that the father tried to give reasons for leaving his young child. “You guys don’t know what’s going on in my life. I got problems, OK?” he said. “I’m sick.”
Nataleigh arrived home in her mother’s arms Sunday evening.
Frederique has been arrested at least three times on drug charges and spent three years in prison, from 2005 to 2008.
