Texas toddler dies after mom leaves her in a hot car for 45 minutes

[Meyer6]

@Condescending_Robot

Everyone could potentially do anything.

I don’t think that’s true at all. Assaulting someone or running someone off the road are conscious choices, even if you feel that those choices are 100% justified at the time. Forgetting and leaving your kids in the car is not a choice, it’s a terrible error.

the collective wisdom of head-up-its ass suburbia on the SDMB wringing its hands about them? No, it’s all about how terrible it is that we don’t empathize with the killers of infants.

The reason that this hits home with you is because the stories are about people dropping off their kids at day care and commuting to their office job and fretting over the proper rear-facing placement of their car seats. These are stereotypical middle class white people activities.

If you look around the SDMB you’ll see that there are people here from many social and racial backgrounds. I’m not sure why you think that we are all middle-class white people. Perhaps you haven’t been around long enough, but there have been threads filled with outrage over every ‘innocent victim’ imaginable, including people arrested for possession, retaliation-type crimes, racially motivated crimes, etc. The idea that we only get worked up about this one topic is ridiculous.

This story hits home with me and I actually *know *it couldn’t happen to me, not because I think I’m better than these people, but because I neither have a child nor own a car. I just know that the reality is that all of us who are human are fallible, and I feel compassion for someone who paid such a terrible price for a moments inattention.

[Rick]

@Diogenes_the_Cynic

I am 100% certain that it would not happen to me. I am too keenly aware – to the point of distraction – when I have a baby in the car.

I’m on my third baby and haven’t forgotten one yet.

I will say that I’ve had lapses for a few seconds when getting out of the car and starting to walk away, but I’ve always caught myself in time. I get the brainfart thing, but I can’t imagine being able to forget for hours at a time.

One should never tempt Mr. Murphy this way.
He can arrange that one extra distraction in those critical few seconds.

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

@bump

First, this kind of thing happens at LEAST once or twice a year it seems, which makes it common enough that everyone should be aware of it.

Second, unless you’re from down here, or somewhere similar, you may not really have a good idea of just how hot it can get, and how fast it can get that hot. I haven’t done any scientific studies, but I suspect that if you did leave your kid in the car, they could likely be in trouble inside of 15 minutes, especially if the child was a baby. It’s a totally different ball game than in say… Minneapolis, where their highs today were lower than our lows last night. (79 degree high vs. low of 80 in Dallas). Many days, if you don’t have a sun shield for your windshield, driving is like something out of “Kung Fu”, where you have to hang onto the burning hot object (steering wheel) and can’t drop it.

I’m not excusing the parents, but I do have a lot of sympathy, and a pretty big understanding of just how fast the consequences can add up in weather like ours.

If the parents did leave them in the car on purpose, then they ought to be left in a hot car all day as well; except in Death Valley, not anywhere in Texas.

We do have some pretty cold winters here, you know. We have the opposite problem. We have people leaving infants in sub-zero weather and freezing them to death.

[NinetyWt]

@lavenderviolet

I’m thinking something simpler.

I read of a campaign to get parents to carry a stuffed animal in the front passenger seat while the child is riding in the child car seat. When you take the child out, you put the stuffed animal in the car seat. If your stuffed animal is still in the passenger seat, that means that the baby is still in the child car seat.

Like all this other stuff it hasn’t caught on too well.

[samclem]

@Diogenes_the_Cynic

We do have some pretty cold winters here, you know. We have the opposite problem. We have people leaving infants in sub-zero weather and freezing them to death.

How many would you say per year the last 20 years or so?

[valleyofthedolls]

@Condescending_Robot

The bottom line on this “don’t condemn parents for killing their kids because IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU” nonsense is that there must be a reason that people feel sympathetic for THESE criminals and not others.

Dude, you’re just talking out of your ass here. Where did anyone in this thread say they were only sympathetic to middle-class white people who roast their babies to the exclusion of all others? Someone starts a thread about X. People respond with their thoughts on X. Just because they’ve have had the audacity to respond with their thoughts on X, however, does not mean they have no interest in Y. It just means that Y was not the topic of the original post. It’s really not that hard.

[QUOTE=Condescending Robot]
And you know what? Those people, who commit crimes for perfectly understandable reasons that could affect anyone here, are still criminals, and we still punish them, and I don’t see any of the people whining about how awful it must be for the murderous parents in this scenario doing any caterwauling about the fates of all of those similar scenario-bound defendants.
[/QUOTE]

If the people you’re talking about are guilty, then too bad for them. Nobody forced them to commit a crime. If, however, they were wrongly convicted, then they have my sympathies just as much as middle-class white people who leave the baby in the Beamer.

[QUOTE=Condescending Robot]
Take it a step further. Right now, there are dozens of people, overwhelmingly black people, who are on death row because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and the prosecutorial apparatus needed a conviction to secure a headline.
[/QUOTE]

See above. If they’re innocent, I am just as sympathetic to these people as I am to the topic at hand.

[QUOTE=Condescending Robot]
here are literally hundreds of thousands of people in jail for being caught with a politically incorrect plant. Unlike the child-killing parents or the poverty-driven gangbanger, these people are actually innocent of any real wrongdoing, but is the collective wisdom of head-up-its ass suburbia on the SDMB wringing its hands about them? No, it’s all about how terrible it is that we don’t empathize with the killers of infants.
[/QUOTE]

If you’re really interested in people’s opinons on marijuana law, why not start a thread on the subject instead of thread-shitting? Oh right, because then you couldn’t make self-righteous assumptions.

[QUOTE=Condescending Robot]
The reason that this hits home with you is because the stories are about people dropping off their kids at day care and commuting to their office job and fretting over the proper rear-facing placement of their car seats.
[/QUOTE]

It doesn’t hit home for me. I don’t have kids, don’t use a car to commute and could care less about car seats. I do, however, loathe it when the morality policy work themselves up into a feeding frenzy. Rest assured, this loathing covers a rainbow of colours and classes.

[QUOTE=Condescending Robot]
hese are stereotypical middle class white people activities. You know what it’s like to do them; you don’t know what it’s like to have a cop burst into your bedroom in the middle of the night without announcing who he is, and then get arrested and sentenced to death for defending yourself against the intruder. You don’t know what it’s like to be beaten for sport, just for walking down the street while being the wrong color, by cops who know that they have total impunity in the American legal/media system. You may or may not know what it’s like to deal with the childhood abuse that is the real cause of crime, though if you do, you certainly have the money and the self-awareness to seek out therapy before you wind up in jail, unlike all the types of people I’ve mentioned.
[/QUOTE]

So if you have sympathy for parents who accidentally leave their children to die in overheated vehicles then you can’t have any empathy for black people treated badly by the police? How does that work?

[QUOTE=Condescending Robot]
The people who think that there is any measurable injustice in the U.S. today in putting people who kill their children in jail because “oopsie! I forgot! silly me!”, given all the actual injustice against actual innocent people or people with actual reasons for their crimes, are unable to see past their own unctuous social sphere, and, for that alone, deserve no sympathy if and when it does happen to them.
[/QUOTE]

Bullshit. This all about you being happy that the imaginary people in your head are suffering.

[Telcontar]

@NinetyWt

I read of a campaign to get parents to carry a stuffed animal in the front passenger seat while the child is riding in the child car seat. When you take the child out, you put the stuffed animal in the car seat. If your stuffed animal is still in the passenger seat, that means that the baby is still in the child car seat.

Like all this other stuff it hasn’t caught on too well.

I was going to suggest something similar. If you have a purse, briefcase, or equivalent, latch it onto the baby seat. Never unlatch it before first emptying the baby seat.

Ideally you’d want a device that was designed to do something else entirely that just happened to also prevent this. Perhaps a wrist sensor on the child that monitors the air temperature and beeps you if it exceeds safe limits. You’d want it to have other functions though, to increase utility. maybe measure pulse?

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

@samclem

How many would you say per year the last 20 years or so?

Not many that I can think of. I can remember only one for sure, off the top of my head that resulted in fatality, but I believe several others have been found in time.

It’s not an epidemic, if that’s what your asking. I guess when I said we have a “problem,” what I meant was that we have the opposite danger.

[Joanie]

@bump

First, this kind of thing happens at LEAST once or twice a year it seems, which makes it common enough that everyone should be aware of it.

Second, unless you’re from down here, or somewhere similar, you may not really have a good idea of just how hot it can get, and how fast it can get that hot. I haven’t done any scientific studies, but I suspect that if you did leave your kid in the car, they could likely be in trouble inside of 15 minutes, especially if the child was a baby. It’s a totally different ball game than in say… Minneapolis, where their highs today were lower than our lows last night. (79 degree high vs. low of 80 in Dallas). Many days, if you don’t have a sun shield for your windshield, driving is like something out of “Kung Fu”, where you have to hang onto the burning hot object (steering wheel) and can’t drop it.

I’m not excusing the parents, but I do have a lot of sympathy, and a pretty big understanding of just how fast the consequences can add up in weather like ours.

If the parents did leave them in the car on purpose, then they ought to be left in a hot car all day as well; except in Death Valley, not anywhere in Texas.

When I was 19, I used to date a guy that my friends all called “The Bump”. They called him that because he had a rather large bump on the side of his head just to one side of his face. No one could figure out why he had this bump or where it came from. But whenever he overheard someone calling him “Bump”, he would just lose his mind. He would want to fight to the death. Talk about angry! He had almost zero self-control.

Today, I think it would be most accurate to describe this fellow’s mental state as being very similar to Dwight Schrute from The Office. He was often extreme in his attitudes. For example, you write, “If the parents did leave them in the car on purpose, then they ought to be left in a hot car all day as well”. To my way of thinking, this is an extreme attitude. You would want to see the parents put to a sweltering death for what could have been a mistake? I guess some parents could have been done it on purpose. But since most all states would allow parents who can’t handle having children to just turn them into to a Children’s Aid Sosiety, wouldn’t it probably have been a mistake. And for that, you want to have them tortured and put to death?

That sure sounds like Dwight to me.

The other thing about Dwight is besides being very extreme, Dwight is also a rank idiot. He probably belongs in some kind of institution. I don’t think he belongs out in the real world with the rest of us.

Anyway, I didn’t date The Bump for very long. As it turned out, he also had an incredibly tiny penis and would prematurely ejaculate whenever he got aroused. I think that was a symptom of his self-control problems. It was a real drag for me and must have been the same for any other woman who was intimate with that fool. I was very happy to have dumped him.

[billfish678]

nm

[Joanie]

@Telcontar

I was going to suggest something similar. If you have a purse, briefcase, or equivalent, latch it onto the baby seat. Never unlatch it before first emptying the baby seat.

Ideally you’d want a device that was designed to do something else entirely that just happened to also prevent this. Perhaps a wrist sensor on the child that monitors the air temperature and beeps you if it exceeds safe limits. You’d want it to have other functions though, to increase utility. maybe measure pulse?

I really like your idea.

Another possible idea would be to expand on the “tying a string around your finger” to remind you of something.

What if the parent tied a string around their finger and attached the other end to the baby seat?

I’m not suggesting this as the best idea or as being ideal for all parents. But it might work for some parents. I think it might work for me.

It might be a bit of trouble to do this every time you take your child for a drive. But, for me, I think my child is worth the trouble.

[Mighty_Girl]

I see a lot of people condemning the parents that quite obviously did not read the article in question. I suggest you do before continuing with this discussion.

I know for certain that this will not happen to me, my daughter is old enough to step out of the car, but I can perfectly understand that a perfect storm of circumstances can get a parent to forget just that one time. Once is enough. A few minutes is enough.

It’s interesting that the article also studies the phenomenon of the “This would never happen to me. So, off with their heads!” parents.

The thing that I remember most vividly about the article was the part about one of the parents, who when coming across the scene of the police opening his car, and realizing what had happened, tried to wrestle a gun from an officer and kill himself. That would have been my reaction exactly.

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

For those who object to punishment for this kind of negligence – are you saying that leaving a baby in a car until it dies should be legal? If not, the what are you saying? Is it a crime or isn’t it?

[Nzinga_Seated]

@Condescending_Robot

The bottom line on this “don’t condemn parents for killing their kids because IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU” nonsense is that there must be a reason that people feel sympathetic for THESE criminals and not others. Everyone could potentially do anything. There may be people here who would kill a person for sexually assaulting a family member, or there may be people here who are just off-balance and would run someone off the road for a traffic offense. Maybe you would rob a store if you were deep in debt to the mob, or maybe you would shoplift a little if you were starving. Every day, there’s plenty of poor black kids who get sucked into a violent gang life through basically no fault of their own, but because of generations of poverty and abuse which are traceable back to the trauma of slavery.

And you know what? Those people, who commit crimes for perfectly understandable reasons that could affect anyone here, are still criminals, and we still punish them, and I don’t see any of the people whining about how awful it must be for the murderous parents in this scenario doing any caterwauling about the fates of all of those similar scenario-bound defendants.

Take it a step further. Right now, there are dozens of people, overwhelmingly black people, who are on death row because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and the prosecutorial apparatus needed a conviction to secure a headline. There are literally hundreds of thousands of people in jail for being caught with a politically incorrect plant. Unlike the child-killing parents or the poverty-driven gangbanger, these people are actually innocent of any real wrongdoing, but is the collective wisdom of head-up-its ass suburbia on the SDMB wringing its hands about them? No, it’s all about how terrible it is that we don’t empathize with the killers of infants.

The reason that this hits home with you is because the stories are about people dropping off their kids at day care and commuting to their office job and fretting over the proper rear-facing placement of their car seats. These are stereotypical middle class white people activities. You know what it’s like to do them; you don’t know what it’s like to have a cop burst into your bedroom in the middle of the night without announcing who he is, and then get arrested and sentenced to death for defending yourself against the intruder. You don’t know what it’s like to be beaten for sport, just for walking down the street while being the wrong color, by cops who know that they have total impunity in the American legal/media system. You may or may not know what it’s like to deal with the childhood abuse that is the real cause of crime, though if you do, you certainly have the money and the self-awareness to seek out therapy before you wind up in jail, unlike all the types of people I’ve mentioned.

The people who think that there is any measurable injustice in the U.S. today in putting people who kill their children in jail because “oopsie! I forgot! silly me!”, given all the actual injustice against actual innocent people or people with actual reasons for their crimes, are unable to see past their own unctuous social sphere, and, for that alone, deserve no sympathy if and when it does happen to them.

I’m not going to lie. I completely feel you on this entire post.

However. When I had my baby, she was teeny tiny. She was born when I was only 7 months along. She was my only little child and I absolutely doted on her. She and I were inseparable. I breast fed her, cuddled her, snuggled her, was overly careful with her and just all-around new mother anal about her.

One day, when I was at work, all of a sudden, my heart exploded in my chest with that sharp, sinking feeling you get when something horrible occurs to you. I thought for a moment that I had left my baby in the van in a freaking snowstorm for 3 hours. Horror washed over me in this heart wrending instant. My routine as a daycare provider was to pick up several children in the daycare van, and then bring them all in, along with my daughter who rode with me. My baby was not there with me at the daycare, though.

One moment later, I remembered that I had dropped her to her Grandma’s. She was spending Grandma’s day off with her. But I guess it could have happened, because for a moment, I thought it had. Somehow, I had a completely out of character moment that convinced me I could forget to take my baby out of the van. One can actually have out-of-character moments.

I don’t know if people should be sent to jail for manslaughter for an honest mistake, as opposed to negligence. If you hit a pedestrian with your car, you aren’t convicted of vehicular manslaughter just off the bat, right? They first determine that you are indeed negligent. If a parent leaves a kid in the car, does that automatically mean they are a negligent parent? Even if their every other action with the child has been nothing short of obsessively attentive?

I’m actually torn on this topic. On the one hand, I think maybe one should have to go to prison for this horrific crime. But on the other hand, I believe I could have been the one in the cuffs at some point.

Because when you have these kinds of weird out of character moments, it doesn’t really depend on how important the subject is. Sometimes I come into the kitchen and can’t remember what I came in there for. It doesn’t matter if it was something really trivial, like grabbing a napkin, or something really important, like turning off the stove before I burn the house down…I still have that same feeling of forgetting for a moment. It isn’t…personal. It is just a weird thing that can happen to humans sometimes. I think.

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

@Nzinga_Seated

If a parent leaves a kid in the car, does that automatically mean they are a negligent parent?

It automatically means you committed an act of negligance, How you are as a parent otherwise is utterly irrelevant.

Should it be legal to leave a baby in a car until it dies, yes or no?

[Nzinga_Seated]

@Diogenes_the_Cynic

It automatically means you committed an act of negligance, How you are as a parent otherwise is utterly irrelevant.

Should it be legal to leave a baby in a car until it dies, yes or no?

Well. No. I guess, I have to answer no to that.

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

OK, then.

[Nzinga_Seated]

@Diogenes_the_Cynic

OK, then.

Well…not so fast there. I’m a bit prone to be easily influenced. Always been a flaw of mine that I battle with.

Reading the article now, I am swaying. And not swaying from emotions. Swaying based on the fact that these people aren’t always charged. Those that make those kind of decisions, they’ve decided that sometimes these horrific mistakes are not crimes.

And Professor David Diamond is pretty persuasive too. I’m all over the place on this one. I find this topic very interesting but confusing.

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

So you’re now saying it should be legal? Anyone who wants to kill their baby need only leave it to die in their car and receive a get-out-of-jail-free card?

[samclem]

@Diogenes_the_Cynic

It automatically means you committed an act of negligance, How you are as a parent otherwise is utterly irrelevant.

Should it be legal to leave a baby in a car until it dies, yes or no?

And, have you quit beating your wife?

Just a nonsense question.