The Baker County Sheriff’s Office says a 10-month-old baby died Wednesday after being left for five hours in an SUV inside a garage while in the care of a babysitter. The child’s mother found her and tried CPR, but it was too late, and she died at the hospital.
Even though the SUV was in the garage, deputies said the temperature inside the vehicle was measured at 133 degrees after she was found at 1 p.m. The hospital said the child’s temperature was 110 degrees, but staff pointed out that was the highest the thermometer could register.
Experts say these tragedies happen far too often and are totally preventable. The Baker County girl’s death was the 14th of a child in a hot car this year, and the sixth in Florida.
“These are not only preventable, they’re predictable,” said Amber Rollins with the national nonprofit Kids and Car Safety. “We see the same contributing factors and circumstances in almost every single case where a child is unknowingly left in a vehicle.”
Rollins said those factors are often a lack of sleep, or parents or guardians going about their days in autopilot mode.
“It’s devastating. We work with dozens and dozens of these families, hundreds, actually hundreds of these families and they never recover,” Rollins said. “This is the kind of pain -- losing a child and knowing you’re the one responsible, even though you had no idea something like this could happen to you.”
In the Baker County case, it was a regular family babysitter who said she went into the home with other children she was babysitting and forgot about the sleeping child until her mother arrived -- five hours later.
The babysitter was arrested and charged with aggravated manslaughter of a child.
Kids and Car Safety says approximately 87% of children who die in hot cars are age 3 or younger and the majority (56%) were unknowingly left by an otherwise loving, responsible parent or caregiver.
Rollins says technology is getting better. Some EvenFlo seats have Bluetooth-enabled chest clips.
“It will alert you if you walk away from the vehicle and that chest clip is still buckled. You’ll get this when the child is left in a car, it’s very loud and you can’t turn it off if you don’t go unbuckle that child,” Rollins said. “Or if you say forget your cell phone in the car as well, then when you get to a three-minute mark after that disconnection of the Bluetooth, that app is going to send push notifications to your emergency contacts that you have preset with GPS coordinates of where that vehicle is so somebody can get there and get that child immediately.”
Jessica Winberry with Safe Kids Northeast Florida and Wolfson Children’s Hospital said there should be multiple layers of protection.
“Putting something in the backseat. You know, some people say your shoe, some people say your phone, very rarely are you going to get far from your car without a shoe or a phone,” Winberry said. “That’s a reminder, look in the backseat and hopefully recognize that you’ve got a child in the car.”
She said in a world of distractions, parents and caregivers need to give themselves as many reminders as possible.
“Setting reminders on your phone, so if you’re the one that has the child this time, and you’re supposed to arrive to Walmart or work or the grocery store, wherever you may be going, set that reminder to check in the back seat. There are certain apps, I believe Waze is an app that oftentimes says ‘Check your car in the backseat’ when you get to your destination,” Winberry said.
Safe Kids Northeast Florida offers free car seat checks and education in which they go over the ways to reduce risks for children.