Six-year-old girl abandoned in the middle of a busy New York street rescued by passerby
Emma has been sent to live with relatives
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Your support makes all the difference.A mother and stepfather have been arrested after abandoning their six-year-old child on a street in Queens, New York.
Mishka Peart, a local woman who spotted the child while she was driving, said the little girl was wearing a cloth surgical mask and was carrying a trash bag and a smaller, reusable bag. Ms Peart saw the girl - whose name is Emma - standing at the corner of a busy intersection.
Ms Peart picked up the girl and drove her to a nearby park, where she was able to contact police.
The girl's parents - Patrice Chambers, 29, and Ms Chamber's boyfriend, Mark Pamphile, 28 - were arrested and charged with child endangerment, child abandonment and endangering the welfare of a child.
"How does this happen?" Ms Peart said Tuesday in a video she took while driving the little girl to the police station. "How is it that this woman has a daughter and leaves her like this?"
Ms Peart told the New York Daily News that she saw Emma running in the street trying to pick up her clothes that had been scattered when they were tossed from her mother's car.
She recalled seeing Emma staring at her as she waited for a light to change, so Ms Peart pulled over and asked the little girl where she was going.
"I asked her where she was going and she said 'I don't know.' I said, 'Where are your parents?"
Emma said she didn't know and that "they drove off and left [her]."
According to a police report detailing the incident, the mother and stepfather drove off and tossed the little girl's belongings out of the window of their car as they sped away.
Mr Pamphile allegedly called the girl's father and told him to go find her because she was "crying like a little b****."
Later, when he was arrested for child endangerment, Mr Pamphile attempted to skirt responsibility for leaving the girl on the side of the road.
"This kid is her kid," he told police. "This kid is not my kid, not my problem, not my responsibility."
Ms Chambers claimed that she and Mr Pamphile first attempted to drop Emma off at her father's house, but her father said Ms Chambers was lying and provided surveillance video footage from his house to prove the couple had never stopped by the house.
Ms Chambers and Mr Pamphile were released from jail without bond. They face up to four years in prison if they're convicted. Emma was turned over to child welfare services in Suffolk County and will be sent to live with a relative, according to an official.
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