Playtime at Chuck E. Cheese’s wasn’t meant to go this way.
But at a 4-year-old’s birthday party last Sunday in Bel Air, parents said, a child was crawling through the plastic maze of tubes, called Skytubes, when he came across something that was clearly out of place.
“My son was playing in the tubes, and my husband was watching him,” Roni Tilton said. “My husband looked up, and when he did, [my son] was playing with a condom.”
The contraceptive was out of the wrapper, she said, and a parent told her that another child was seen blowing it up — as if it were a balloon.
“When I hear ‘condom’ and ‘4-year-old’ in the same sentence, I have a problem right there,” said Linda Braerman, whose son was having another birthday party at the eatery.
The party had just begun, and when Braerman heard about the condom, she immediately inquired to workers at the restaurant. The general manager told her that the condom was in the package and must have fallen out of someone’s pocket.
It seemed odd why anyone crawling in the tubes would have a condom, she said, but if it was in the package, “that changed the whole picture of what I had in my mind.”
But then Tilton told Braerman that Tilton’s son had been playing with it out of the package, and the area was closed and cleaned for only a few minutes.
So Braerman again confronted a manager. “The manager blatantly lied to me” about the condom being out of the package, she said. “It was me calling her on her lie, and then she got very defensive and said, ‘You can leave.’ ”
A manager at the restaurant, located at 5 Bel Air South Parkway., declined to comment. “I’m not authorized to give out any information,” the woman said.
Brenda Holloway, a company spokeswoman, said employees followed the appropriate guidelines for dealing with such incidents. She said she could not comment on the allegations of lying.
“A parent reported that they found their child playing with it up in the tubes,” she said. “When we went over to investigate, we didn’t find it in the tubes. We found it over on the floor. It looked like an unused condom, and the package was laying next to it.”
The Harford County Health Department received a call from parents Monday afternoon, and inspectors went to the restaurant to investigate, said Bill Wiseman, department spokesman.
Wiseman said the condom posed no safety threat.
“The telling feature is that apparently this condom was unused,” he said. “Stupid stuff happens sometimes. It doesn’t make it illegal. It just makes it reprehensible.”
“It ruined the party, it really did,” Braerman said of the event she was attending. “It made for a very uncomfortable situation.”
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