“I saw Jackson off to the side, about five feet from a water toy. I ran over, thinking he had fallen, to console him,” Sechrist explains. “I picked him up and took him to a different section of the water area, but he was still inconsolable.”
Sechrist says that he sat his son down and tried to dry him off, but something was wrong when he got to Jackson’s feet. “I could feel the heat coming off of them,” he says. “I looked down and noticed that the skin had basically melted on the bottoms of both of his feet.”
Sechrist explained that the grate was on the ground close to the splash pad, and when Q13 Fox tested the temperature of the grate the next day, around the same time, they found that it had reached to about 130 degrees.
“Just putting my hand on here like that, I can’t keep it here for half a second, and my 1-1/2-year-old son walked across [it],” Sechrist told them.
“If I could switch places with him, I would in a heartbeat," he lamented. And in a statement made to CafeMom, Sechrist says that his son “is recovering well. [He] was able to put some weight on his feet last night.
“My whole purpose of sharing this story is to get the word out to other parents so that this doesn’t happen to anyone else,” he adds.
CafeMom reached out to Seattle Parks and Recreation, but as of this reporting has yet to receive a comment about the incident.
