New York City’s Bronx police arrested a mother on Thursday morning for leaving her two children alone in a hot car. According to videos from multiple television stations, a woman in the Bronx area (another source says Yonkers) parked her car on West 183rd Street and left her two children inside. Police arrived at the scene 18 minutes later and rescued the children.
The woman, seen wearing a floral headscarf in the video, was seen talking to the police with her back to the camera. The temperature in New York City on Thursday was over 80 degrees Fahrenheit. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) states that temperatures inside a car can rise to 109 degrees Fahrenheit (42.78 degrees Celsius) within 20 minutes in such weather conditions, and a child can die when their body temperature reaches 107 degrees Fahrenheit (41.67 degrees Celsius).
The two children involved in this incident, aged 7 and 10, a boy and a girl, were unharmed. Every summer, there are cases where parents forget their children in cars, leading to tragic outcomes. According to data from the National Safety Council, an average of 37 children under the age of 15 have died each year since 1998 due to being left in hot cars. The years 2018 and 2019 saw peaks in such tragic incidents, with 53 children dying in hot cars over these two years, while there were 29 cases last year and 2 cases already this year.
Just this past Monday, a couple in Indiana locked their 5-year-old and 1-year-old children in a Ford SUV while they went to a Walmart. It was the hottest day in the local area, with temperatures soaring to 93 degrees Fahrenheit (33.89 degrees Celsius). The two children were left in the sweltering car for 40 minutes at 125 degrees, one child was found sweating profusely while the other was bewildered, luckily without major harm. The couple was arrested by the police, and the children were taken into custody by child services.
On July 26, 2019, 39-year-old Juan Rodriguez from Rockland County, New York, inadvertently left his 4-year-old twin children in the car on his way to work after dropping off his eldest child at a daycare. After finishing work around 4 p.m., he started driving home and only noticed his twins in the backseat after a 10-minute drive, realizing he should have dropped them off at another daycare in the morning. He stopped the car, howling in anguish, but sadly, the children had already succumbed to the heat.
With the peak of summer approaching, government agencies and media outlets are urging parents to always remember that their children are in the car and to check the backseat before leaving the vehicle.