Fall guy Wai-lam manages a smile

TODDLER Fu Wai-lam found himself the centre of attention yesterday after he fell from a third-floor window.

But 23-month-old Wai-lam still managed a bewildered smile as he was wheeled into hospital.

Amazingly the mischievous tot only suffered a broken knee as he bounced from a tin-sheet canopy to the concrete pavement.

Wai-lam had climbed from his bed and through the window left open by his aunt as she hung clothes out at the flat in Wing Kong Street, Hunghom.

But when police called to question his aunt, Yeung Yuk-hung, 26, they found that she had overstayed her travel permit from China and she was arrested.

Wai-lam's father, a restaurant employee, said normally he and his wife locked all the windows when they went out to work.

Wai-lam's dramatic fall gave the owner of a metal factory on the ground-floor a scare.

'I heard a big bang and found the baby on the ground outside,' Chan Chi-fai said.

'At first, he did not scream or move and I thought he was dead.

'Shortly afterwards, he started crying and yelling for his mother.

'I picked him up and carried him into the workshop and my partner rang 999.' Ada Kwan Wai-yin, director of the Hong Kong Society for the Protection of Children, said the Government should build more day-creche or nursery centres for children with working parents who had to be left in the care of grandparents or neighbours.