Losing a child would not be seen as a punishment by some parents, especially in custody disputes and disputed child support cases. Without additional punishment as would be applied to a caregiver or nanny who made the same mistake, a marvelous, though horrific, loophole has been created for anyone wanting to practice infanticide.
This is the best argument I’ve seen for prosecuting such cases – without prosecuting, people who want to kill their kids might see a chance at getting away with it by leaving them in a hot car.
But you’re only saying that because people have actually done it.
Oh, wait…
Do you have a cite for this? From the coverage I read of the trial, the police forensic investigator testified that there was no evidence on his computer or other devices that he had researched hot car deaths. I thought this was one of the most damning claims the police/prosecution had made, and if it wasn’t true, that significantly hurt the case against him.
I think it’s quite possible that he purposely killed the kid, but I was expecting an acquittal.
No. I do not know if he did it. However, I don’t think the prosecution came close to proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
And yet expert pathologists stated that there is no way that decomposition could have begun in the actual time frame and hence there could not be “a smell of death”. Two of the police that attended the scene made no mention of a smell of death, but amended their statements to include it a year later.
There were several police actions that are questionable. The lead detective, Detective Stoddard, made several statements during the hearing process that were flat out wrong and were withdrawn before final trial. But they helped poison the well against Harris.
Even at trial one of the police (not Stoddard) insisted that an interview was suspicious because of a lack of emotion, yet a recording was played to the court which demonstrated clear emotion.
This is one of several things that makes me ask “why would he do that?” if he were trying to get away with murder. If there was no smell of death (as per pathologists), then it is perfectly understandable. But if he were murdering his child, why would he do this possibly suspicious act? Why not get back to his car to go home after the work day (or to the movies, as was actually the case), “discover” his child, and freak out there and then?
In a similar vein, this guy works in IT and is presumably reasonably smart and tech savvy. Why would he spend the “killing day” engaging in perverse and illegal behavior? Why would he not wipe his phone and computer clean of incriminating evidence? Why would he go back to his car to drop off some shopping?
For anyone interested in more detail, the Atlanta Journal Constitution did an interesting podcast - season 2 of Breakdown. Season 1, about an unrelated case, is very interesting also.
You are correct about the forensic investigator in that he found no evidence of Harris searching for information about hot car deaths.
I have read (and I cannot remember if this was reported in court) that two people sent emails to him with links warning about hot deaths. One was a PSA-type email from a state agency. He clicked the links and viewed/read the web sites to which he was directed.
Similarly, Harris did not research “child free”, but he did type in the Reddit URL for the childfree subreddit. This was sent to him by a friend, who testified in court that Harris’s response was “grossness”.
Updating the John Junek case the manslaughter charges were dropped:
I left my three year old strapped in the car seat in the driveway for 15 minutes once. I put away all the groceries and only then realized my mistake with enormous horror. She was very upset of course. No more than I was. There was no physical harm.For all your care and vigilance it happens.
I couldn’t say if I would recover at all if my child died, either by my negligence or any other way. I wouldn’t be surprised at suicide after these incidents.
My kids are adults now. I never left them in a car alone when they were young, but I doubt anyone would do that intentionally. A sociopath like Chris Watts perhaps, but anyone who is not a monster like him, no.
I haven’t done research on this, but I’m surprised there are no safety devices yet available to at least lower the risk of negligently leaving babies, or toddlers in cars to near zero.
Off the top of my head, why not a simple Bluetooth device permanently attached to baby seats, tuned to your cell phone (which almost everyone keeps on their person at all times) that sets off an alarm on the phone when it’s separated by more than 10 feet from the device? A similar device could be attached to the wrist of toddlers. The negligence appears to occur when the parent is out and about, not when they are getting the babies/toddlers ready for transport. Parents could easily get in the habit of arming the device when they are putting the kids in the car.
There must be other hi-tech solutions to the problem, too. They should be mandatory.
There have been such products for years now. I’m a little surprised you hadn’t run across any. Some are pretty good, even. But none are really fully vetted and tested yet.
Mandatory safety devices, especially for cars, naturally require a considerable amount of testing and approval and so on - it literally took decades after seat belts were invented for them to be mandated nationwide. I don’t think any products are there yet. And none are especially foolproof - you need a phone, batteries need to be charged, parents have to remember to turn them on, etc.
So, yes, parents can get such devices but that’s a very different matter from avoiding such incidents at all. As tragic as these incidents are, it involves a few cases out of millions of car trips a year. Getting that even lower is a very high expectation.
The trouble is people who say that they would never need such a product.
3 weeks ago, I forgot my 19-year-old chihuahua in the car for almost 4 hours. Thank God it was overcast! He doesn’t usually travel with me, and I was somewhat pre-occupied that day. He doesn’t do much but sleep, so it isn’t abnormal for him to not have my attention. I felt horrible! I can’t imagine it ever happening again. It really scared me that I could do this.
As I said, my kids are now adults, so I really haven’t had a need to run across them lately. I don’t think anything like that was available ~20 years ago.
I understand that statistically, kids dying in a hot car is rare, but it is sufficiently horrible to fast-track solutions, I believe. And, these days, simple Bluetooth-type alarm devices should be dirt cheap.
If it’s especially difficult to get safety devices mandated for cars, then perhaps getting them mandated for child seats would be easier.
And, certainly, no safety device is foolproof, but a combination of gross negligence, along with a dead battery and/or device failure should be quite rare, I believe.
If such devices were readily available, and affordable, I would have no sympathy for parents who didn’t use them and would be fully in support of prosecuting them to the fullest if their child died as a result. Negligence should not be a defense in those cases.
Our new Honda minivan has a system that notices you opened one of the back seat sliding doors and reminds you to check the back seat when you park the car after driving.
Since we don’t have small children, we chuckle about it. But I hope this does help to prevent this kind of tragedy in a few cases.
^^^ That is a very good solution. It would be great to have that required on all vehicles (not just minivans).
People who forget that their children are in the car after they park are idiots, but rarely evil. Humans aren’t perfect and sometimes good people are negligent, sometimes grossly so.
I do have compassion for many/most parents in the hot-car child death cases I’ve read about. They lost their child, which is about as horrible an experience as any human can endure.
But, the child lost his/her life, which is even worse.
Sometimes I think we humans are evolving technologically faster than we are evolving cognitively. We are getting ourselves into messes that we may not be able to get out of (i.e. global warming, nuclear annihilation, AI…all the way down to vehicles we can’t entirely operate safely). So, I say, let’s evolve, but let’s do so safely.
There was an article years ago in the WAPO about these kinds of accidents. It’s paywalled, but worth a read if you have access:
The wealthy do, it turns out. And the poor, and the middle class. Parents of all ages and ethnicities do it. Mothers are just as likely to do it as fathers. It happens to the chronically absent-minded and to the fanatically organized, to the college-educated and to the marginally literate. In the last 10 years, it has happened to a dentist. A postal clerk. A social worker. A police officer. An accountant. A soldier. A paralegal. An electrician. A Protestant clergyman. A rabbinical student. A nurse. A construction worker. An assistant principal. It happened to a mental health counselor, a college professor and a pizza chef. It happened to a pediatrician. It happened to a rocket scientist.
Last year it happened three times in one day, the worst day so far in the worst year so far in a phenomenon that gives no sign of abating.
The facts in each case differ a little, but always there is the terrible moment when the parent realizes what he or she has done, often through a phone call from a spouse or caregiver. This is followed by a frantic sprint to the car. What awaits there is the worst thing in the world.
Each instance has its own macabre signature. One father had parked his car next to the grounds of a county fair; as he discovered his son’s body, a calliope tootled merrily beside him. Another man, wanting to end things quickly, tried to wrestle a gun from a police officer at the scene. Several people – including Mary Parks of Blacksburg – have driven from their workplace to the day-care center to pick up the child they’d thought they’d dropped off, never noticing the corpse in the back seat.
It’s been on most of the recent sedans that I’ve rented.
I had one “close call” with my now 17 year-old son when he was an infant.
The daily routine of loading him into the back seat and taking the same route to daycare gets to be so repetitive that once you start driving and the little guy is silent your mind starts to wander to things like what is waiting for you at work that day.
I was so deep in thought that I drove past the daycare, which was not unusual as there were days he stayed home with mom or a relative, and I proceeded to work.
I was only a few blocks from work when I’m not sure what made me glance back, or if he made a noise but I suddenly became aware he was still in the car.
I was pretty freaked out as I made a u-turn and headed back to the daycare and was shaking for the rest of the morning. It was a cool fall day so he probably wouldn’t have been in danger but it was just so jarring to suddenly be in the shoes of those parents who simply “fergot they were still in the back seat”. My heart breaks for them.
The exact same article was linked to in the first response to the OP in this very thread nine years ago.
Anyway, I agree that it it is an excellent piece of journalism. The Pulitzer Prize it won was well-deserved.