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Well, like Hair said... people make lousy witnesses. It's one thing when people are asked to recall things that they know they'll have to recall... but it's quite another to expect people to reliably recall something they weren't expecting to have to recall.

I remember a session of one of my law enforcement classes that somebodyorother (maybe marshalls or DEA? not sure) was putting on:

We were in a classroom that we'd borrowed from a local school. There were thirty or so people in the room, and at some point in the presentation of some L.E. topics... some guy in the room gets up and grabs a package off the instructor's desk and runs out of the room with it.

The instructor goes: "You were all just witnesses to a crime. That 'student' just stole something. Get a fresh piece of paper and write out a statement of everything you saw. After we handed them up to him, he starts reading them. It was amazing, the gamut of things that "witnesses" saw... some said he ran out of the room, some said he walked. Some said it was a box, some said it was a bag. And... I kid you not... Some said the guy was white. Some said he was hispanic. Some said he was black.

Of course it was a set-up... after this the "guy" comes back into the room and the rest of the lesson is spent discussing how "eyewitness" accounts of events are simply NOT to be trusted. It is actually a fairly common device that is employed all over the LE world to reinforce the idea that eyewitnesses aren't the be-all and end-all of crime investigation. It was a good lesson.

I've been through one of those classes where they do that too. I coulda told 'em at the beginning I'd be lousy at it. I'm not even one of those wimmin who notices when her friends get a haircut!

What disturbs me about this was the lack of responsibility of the child. Seems to me perhaps the woman should have been required to wait in the office not roam the halls while the kid was roaming the hall coming to the office.

And --- howcome I have to be disturbed with video surveilance at my campus but they don't have it at a place where something like this happens? Kindergarteners just need a little extra watching IMO.... not like they can fend for themselves in most of these situations.