The parents of a 3-year-old boy who died from a rare brain-eating amoeba that he picked up playing at a Texas splash pad have sued the city of Arlington for negligence.
Tariq Williams and Kayla Mitchell filed the lawsuit over the death of their son, Bakari Williams, in Tarrant County District Court in Fort Worth on Monday morning.
“On behalf of our family and our friends we just want you to know that Bakari was a loving, energetic, passionate, sweet, beautiful, innocent boy. He didn’t deserve to die in this manner,” Williams said, the Fort-Worth Star-Telegram reported.
Williams and Mitchell regularly brought the toddler to Don Misenhimer Park but after his last visit there, he developed a 102-degree fever and struggled to stand up by himself, the outlet reported.
“All he wanted to do was lay down,” Mitchell said.
Bakari was hospitalized with primary amebic meningoencephalitis, a rare and often fatal infection caused by the naegleria fowleri amoeba, and died on Sept. 11.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention later found the amoeba in water samples collected from the splash pad of the park that he visited, the city said.
Bakari’s parents allege in their lawsuit that city employees “failed to adequately monitor and chlorinate the city’s splash pad water, making the splash pad unreasonably dangerous.”
A city spokeswoman declined to comment on the suit because city officials had not yet seen it.
The CDC said cases of naegleria fowleri are rare, with just 34 infections recorded in the country from 2010 to 2019.
People often become infected when water containing the amoeba enters the body through the nose, typically when people go swimming or diving in lakes and rivers.
With Post wires