That article is behind a paywall. Could you summarize it?
Dad distracted by phone call, leaves kid in hot car. Neighbor kid sees, knocks on door, dad ignores it because he’s on the phone, kid breaks in to car, rescues child, who, per doctors, was only minutes away from death. Dad wants to sue neighbors for damage to car. Prudence advises writer (mom) to dump the motherfucker immediately.
Thanks for the summary. Also, here is a gift link to a sixteen-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning feature article from the Washington Post on the subject of hot car deaths.
That is one quick thinking, cool headed 13 year old.
I wonder how much (deliberate or inadvertent) emergency response training she got from her mom.
Not to mention, in breaking the window she cut her own arm enough to require stitches, and still had the presence of mind to ignore what must have been painful and scary to focus on saving the toddler’s life.
Yeah, breaking a car window is a lot harder than most people think.
With the adrenaline flowing and being focused on the task at hand, she may not have felt the injury.
It’s a well known phenomenon in stressful or life threatening situations.
True, I’ve experienced this myself before. But often being on an adrenaline high doesn’t lead to good decision-making, but she still knew to get the unresponsive kid to her mom without delay.
I just re-read the story and I missed an important point the first time around.
She was helping her mother treat the baby.
It has to be understood that Dear Prudence type of letters aren’t particularly a good source for reliable reporting.
But it makes for fun recreational outrage, so carry on.
I was going to bring up the idea that this might be fake, then I figured, eh, doesn’t matter. Even if it’s just a story it’s a good one. Everyone involved is anonymous, we don’t even know where this was supposed to have taken place.
Even were this presented as a hypothetical situation, it’s worthy of comment IMO.
Well, it’s a form of social science. And as such, it shirks falsifiability yet doesn’t defy credulity.
There was a more innocent time when advice columnists believed the letters they received were sincere. And then some students from Yale started to prank Ann Landers, to the extent that she dismissed any letters with New Haven postmarks.
It doesn’t? While there is no end to stupidity, my assumption is that the more outrageous the story, the less likely the truth.
But it does make good RO, so carry on.
If I was the neighbor the car would mysteriously catch fire in the middle of the night.
The summary did not include that the husband was distracted by a phone call from work as he pulled into the driveway. The heroine kid saw the car arrive and came over to return a hedge trimmer, spotted the forgotten infant, and repeatedly rang the doorbell. Still on the phone call, hubby ignored it which is when the kid smashed the glass with the hedge trimmer.
If you’d paid some attention, putz, your precious car would not have been damaged.
I’m willing to believe that there was no hot car baby, just a man-child husband with a cherished car, a jealous wife who resented the car, and an embellished letter to Dear Prudence for a seal of approval on dumping his ass.
I remember, way back when I was a teen and living at home, I was woken up to the sound of a car accident in front of my house. I could see someone had smashed into the back of my dad’s car, parked (legally) on the other side of the road. I grabbed a cordless phone to call 911 and ran across the street to check on things. I was the first/only person out there. I got the car turned off, got the police/fire on the way and then realized I ran across a lot of broken glass to get there and I’m not wearing shoes. Don’t get me wrong, this was shattered tempered/safety glass, so not exactly a Die Hard situation, but still not something I wanted to walk back across without that adrenaline flowing.
Today’s kids in a hot car news (verified as true) comes to us courtesy of an intoxicated AZ dad who left four kids to roast for an hour.
Where was he that was of such importance?
In this case, weren’t the kids old enough to get out of the car on their own?