5-year-old found with marijuana at school

KENSINGTON - December 18, 2012 (WPVI) -- Investigators in Philadelphia want to know how and why a 5-year-old girl went to school with marijuana.

Only Action News was there as 24-year-old Susan Burkett walked out of Philadelphia Police Special Victims Unit moments after being questioned about her 5-year-old daughter bringing two small bags of marijuana to her Kensington school.

"She's a good mommy. I don't know where this came from. I really don't," Burkett's mother Peggy Brownsweiger said.

Burkett's mother was with her when they got the call that Horatio B. Hackett School administrators discovered the pot while the kindergartner was at lunch, surrounded by her classmates.

"She's in there trying to talk to the baby- if she found it on the way to school or where it came from and the baby's so scared, she don't know what to say," Brownsweiger said.

The school contacted police who confiscated the drugs and went to work interviewing the small child and her mother.

Burkett is a single mother of four children, ages 3 to 8.

At her home a couple of blocks away from the school, a social worker with the Department of Human Services made a visit to start a case on the family.

"I help her do everything I possibly can. As a single parent, she's the best mom I know, struggling so bad," Brownsweiger said.

Action News spoke with two sisters who both have children at Hackett School. They say they learned of the incident quickly and praised the school for its actions, while they condemned the mother.

"As a mother she should have checked her kid's lunch bag and not even have that around her kids," parent Samantha Bromley said.

"It's a good school. I'm glad they caught on to it, I'm really glad they caught on to it. Maybe they will be stricter, very much stricter. Hopefully they check more things going in there," parent Donna Bromley said.

The Philadelphia School District says it's letting police handle the matter.

Detectives say the incident is still under investigation.

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philadelphia, drugs, local/state, kenneth moton

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