A fire March 8 at a children's home near Guatemala City killed 22 teenage girls, Guatemalan officials said. It was inside one of these dorms that a teenage girl made a final, desperate bid to be heard. “By the time the room was unlocked, it was too late,” Leonel Dubón, director of a child advocacy group in Guatemala, told The Washington Post. The deaths were agonizing not just because the victims were so young and vulnerable, but because the government could have — and should have — prevented them, relatives and human rights advocates said. A woman who lived near the shelter told El Periodico that three of the girls had asked her for help committing suicide.

Source: Washington Post March 09, 2017 11:54 UTC