mother_arrested_car_buffet

Was a Mother Arrested After Leaving Kids in the Car for Nine Hours at a Buffet?

A September 2018 World News Daily Report item titled “Mother arrested for leaving children in the car for 9 hours while at all-you-can-eat buffet” circulates regularly on Facebook.

The story has a mugshot that purports to show the mother in the story:

A mother was arrested yesterday after she left her four children aged between one and seven years old in her car for more than nine hours while she was eating alone in a restaurant.

According to the Richmond Police Department, 34-year-old Raquel Hernandez decided to leave her kids in the car while treating herself to an all-you-can-eat meal at the Golden Corral Buffet & Grill.

The 400-lbs woman arrived around 11 AM and was still eating when the police arrived on the site at 8:20 PM.

29-year-old Sarah Ferguson, the waitress who warned the police, says she noticed the kids in the car when she arrived for her shift and saw them again when she finished her work.

“I saw them in the car when I arrived around 11:30 in the morning, I thought their mother was gone for a quick visit at the nearby pharmacy or something. But when I finished my shift eight hours later, they were still there!”

Although the story spread across Facebook from September 2018 onward, neither it nor any other World News Daily Report content represents trustworthy reporting. Each page on the WNDR site features the following disclaimer at its bottom:

World News Daily Report assumes all responsibility for the satirical nature of its articles and for the fictional nature of their content. All characters appearing in the articles in this website – even those based on real people – are entirely fictional and any resemblance between them and any person, living, dead or undead, is purely a miracle.

The mugshot was stolen from an unrelated 2010 arrest for criminal trespass; it does not show a woman arrested for leaving her children in the car while she spent nine hours at an all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant. Another fake news site, Huzlers, shared the same photograph and claim in September 2018.