While I understand not wanting to read the articles linked, they offer the answers to your question. It is up to the state prosecutor to determine the charge.
The problem with these cases is the charge is usually up to the prosecutor. In this case, the rationale for a murder charge was that there was “cruelty to children in the first degree — which results in the loss of life” which allows a murder conviction. When you look at this case, though, it’s exactly like so many others. The father was supposed to drop the child off at daycare and instead went right to work. After work, he was driving home when he realized the child was still in the car, pulled over and tried to resuscitate the child.
As I’ve told in threads like this previously, I had a :smack: moment when, as a second-time mum, I was going shopping for the first time since having my son…I guess he was probably a week old at that point.
So I bundled my daughter into her restrainer seat in the back of my Beetle, backed out of the driveway, and got halfway to the shopping centre when it hit me that I’d forgotten ‘something’…and a nanosecond later I realised it was my newborn child.
Yes, he was safe and sound tucked up in his cradle still fast asleep by the time I got home in a total hysterical panic. Yes, with other parents, I was able to laugh about it later as we compared similar stories.
But what if? What if the ‘brain-fritz’ had happened under different circumstances? What if it had been my first-born at the same age, who I may have forgotten I had when going to the supermarket…on a hot Melbourne summer’s day?
We’re all just one mistake away from a catastrophe, every single one of us. Bugger up the routine, and anything can happen to anyone.
When my third child was about three months old, my parents came to town for her baptism. We left the older two with our neighbor, put the baby in the car, and drove over to their hotel to pick them up. I was sleep deprived, and excited to see my parents. My husband and I both got out of the car, and sat and chatted with my parents in their hotel room for about 15 minutes before deciding to go back to our house. We all walked back to the car…and there was the baby, sleeping in her car seat. I was horrified, and still think about that. That baby is a happy and healthy 23 year old now, and I was an excellent mother, if I do say so myself. But yeah…I forgot my baby in a car.
Spot On! You totally nailed it’ it’s obvious that most parents cook their babies in their oven so they can savor the aroma and the diminishing screams and cries of pain, terror and despair while their babies cook. Only then do they transfer the tiny corpses to a hot vehicle for a convenient alibi. This is why you never hear of older children dying in this fashion…THEY WON’T FIT IN THE OVEN!
Okay, seriously? Go fuck yourself, you despicable piece of shit, because if you actually manage to reproduce, the world will be diminished by that act.
Just for the record, I don’t think the OP nearwildheaven is a troll in the generally accepted sense of the word. I suspect she has some sort of late-onset intellectual disability.
She claims to have been a pharmacist in a previous life, but now spends her waking hours hanging out on messageboards devoted to parenting, marriage and marriage breakdowns. Her posts are very often anecdotes that she has repeated from these purported boards, and her willingness to relay them without any sort of analytic assessment strikes me as indicative of a degree of brain damage.
A stroke? Dementia? Alcohol induced brain disease?
Maybe she’ll come back and explain…
[Moderating]
Telling other posters to fuck themselves is a violation of Pit rules. Please avoid this in the future.
No warning issued.
[/Moderating]
I’ve done it, in reverse. I forgot to pick my son up from daycare because it wasn’t part of my normal routine. Walked out of work, got in the car and just drove home. My SO greeted me at the door with a confused look. “Where’s Tom?” . Gasp, horror, laugh, and then my phone starts ringing - daycare asking where I am. “I’ll be there in five minutes!” and I jump back in the car and zoom off to get him. We all laugh at my forgetfulness later. There goes my shot at Mother of the Year, haha. It was embarrassing, but because no harm was done we could have a chuckle.
Yeah. I’m paranoid about doing it the other way around and I compulsively check his seat. I’m tired and forgetful and I have a head full of things that need doing. I operate in auto pilot far too often.
Then you may well be substantially more risky to your children than these parents were. The common thread in all these cases is that the child had been in a car with a single adult. I Am Not Your Statistician but my first guess would be that drivers whose “priority” is a child in the back seat rather than concentrating on the road in front of them will kill substantially more children in crashes than those who drive safely and then forget the child at the end of the journey.
Indeed, the obvious explanation for this phenomenon is that driving creates such a complete break between your thoughts before and after the journey.
You know why cars manufactured in the last ten or fifteen years have lights that turn off automatically after a couple of minutes? Because people used to leave them on ALL THE TIME, and kill the battery. When most cars were manuals, you could push-start them, but as automatics became the rule and not the exception, a dead battery meant going around asking people to give you a jump start (this was before cell phones), or calling a tow truck to come do it.
It was a big hassle, and yet, people did it, all the time. Cars were equipped with a bonging sound if you left the lights on, and people still did it. Locked their keys in their cars, too. Same bonging sound, but unless you had the kind of car where the driver door could be locked from the outside with the key, ONLY, you locked your keys in your car at some point.
Some people are thinking “A baby is more important than lights or keys!” but that’s beside the point. The part of your brain that is operating doesn’t know that. It just knows how to perform a rote function, and that’s why these things happen most often when the baby isn’t part of the rote function (mom is dropping the kid off instead of dad), or there’s a disruption or distraction competing with the rote function, like a phone call.
I am sick to death of hearing these stories, over and over every fucking summer. There has GOT to be a way to fucking STOP it.
The cops don’t buy his story. I’ve been told by an officer who has handled this kind of case that the smell of a baby who has died in a hot car is indescribable. This guy got in his car and drove off and didn’t notice?
Um, cite? I cannot imagine that a child who has died from overheating has any sort of ‘smell’, unless the child has been in the car for a number of days. Mere hours? I call bullshit.
Sorry, I can’t cite what was told to me in a conversation years ago. If you don’t buy it, that’s your call to make.
Yeah, the article Ferret Herder linked to mentions :
Fine article by the way, but hard reading.
My first son slept no more than 20 minutes at a stretch for the first four months of his life. I was a walking zombie. If other parents have similar babies (and I’m sure they do), I’m surprised babies don’t get forgotten in cars more often. Mine survived more by good luck than good management.
I’ve done this as well; left the newborn in the house and driven about a block before realising. It was the trigger of asking my partner if he’d remembered the baby’s bag that made us both realise we’d forgotten the fucking baby.
Ah, those sleep deprived first few weeks.
In my defence, I was also crook with a dose of the mumps when I birthed the second kid. So sleep deprived AND lurgied…great combo!
I have nothing useful to add to this thread that hasn’t been said, but sometime when the stupid is particularly heavy you need an extra hand to throw it down the quarry.
Oh, and for those who think such tragedies are an impossibility for them? That your methods and routines are so watertight for that ever to happen? You are wrong, but I hope that fortune ensures you never find that out.
I think the idea of keeping something important (purse etc) always in the back seat, and always opening the back door every time to cement it in your routine is brilliant. Since the advent of front airbags and moving kiddos to the back became required, it nearly guarantees this will happen from time to time.
Not to equate the two, but this brings up the assholes who take their pets with them in the summer. Leave them home dammit. If they are not a service dog and can’t come inside with you, leave them home.