Girl, 7, in coma with horrific burns after TikTok challenge causes toy explosion

A 7-year-old Missouri girl named Scarlett Selby was left in a coma after a squishy toy exploded while she was attempting a viral TikTok challenge.“It all happened so quickly,” the victim’s father Josh Selby, 44, told Kennedy News while recounting the horrific ordeal.“I heard her scream and it was like a blood-curdling scream.”The tot, who resides in Festus, was copying a challenge she saw on TikTok and Youtube where people place NeeDoh — a squishy stress cube made of rubber with a polyvinyl alcohol filling — in the freezer and then microwave it for several seconds to make it more malleable.

“She’d frozen the NeeDoh cube the night before and the next day she showed me it was rock solid and was playing with it,” recalled Josh.“She stuck it in the microwave.

I was watching her and saw her touch it to check it wasn’t too hot when she pulled it out.”This harmless-seeming experiment went awry after the gelatinous toy exploded, showering Scarlett’s face and chest with molten goo.Josh reportedly heard his daughter scream in agony, after which he ran over and tried to scrape the burning goo off her body and clothes, but this was difficult given how “thick and sticky” the napalm-like substance was.“Whenever I touched her, my hand stuck to her,” lamented the distraught father, who said he “ripped her shirt off of her” because the jelly had adhered to it as well.

Her dad and mom, Amanda Blankenship, 35, drove their imperiled daughter 30 minutes to the St Louis Children’s Hospital, in St Louis.She was reportedly in so much agony that she was “still screaming in pain” even after arriving, according to Amanda.“It was terrible how scared she was and how much that hurt her,” lamented her “heartbroken” mother.Upon arrival at the facility, doctors placed Scarlett into an induced coma — where she remained for three days — because they were concerned that the burns on her mouth would cause her airways to swell up and close.

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