Awareness Sought on Hot Car Danger

July 14, 2002 -- It seems like a no-brainer: Don't lock your children inside hot cars and leave them there.

Yet, in the last 10 years, more than 300 children have died from heat after being left in an unattended car, and child safety advocates want parents to understand the dangers.

Right now, only 11 states have laws that make it a crime to leave a child in an unattended vehicle. Seven more states have laws pending.

But Heather Paul, executive director of the National Safe Kids Campaign, a group that works to protect children from all kinds of dangers, says awareness probably can do more than laws to solve the problem.

"I think now, with much more indignation on the part of so many of us and more media attention, perhaps we can bring these numbers down," she said. "I think the laws of child endangerment, in general, cover this egregious situation. I think even more important than the language of the law is education. And that's what we're dealing with — the ignorance of parents who don't know the consequences of heat, and they're paying a terrible price."

String of Incidents

Ten kids in hot cars have died this year alone.

In Texas, 9-month-old Lorenzo Rueda died in his mother's SUV on Tuesday in 90-degree heat. His distraught mother said she forgot he was in the car. He spent his last five hours on Earth strapped in his car seat.

In Columbus, Ohio, last week, Richard Joseph Poulin frantically called his child's mother to say he didn't know where 4-year-old Dominic was. Poulin had been drinking and didn't remember he'd left the boy in the car for 15 hours. Luckily, Dominic survived.

Last Sunday, a Good Samaritan saved the life of a 2-year-old boy when he was found passed out in his mom's car in Cleveland.

"My sister-in-law pulled him out and he was still really lethargic and his clothes were dripping with sweat," said Suzanne Hartman.

The boy's mother was shoplifting in the near-by mall, police say.

Tarajee Maynor, 25, left her 10-month-old girl and 3-year-old boy in a locked car near Detroit while she spent 3½ hours in a beauty salon. Her children died and she was charged with involuntary manslaughter. Her defense?

"There is no explanation for it except like she indicated during the course of her interrogation, that she was really too stupid and too naive to understand or to appreciate the danger that those children were in," said her attorney, Elbert Hatchett.

Car Heat + Kids = Deadly Combination

But advocates for kids' safety want people to understand this: Heat and cars are a deadly combination. When the temperature outside is 93 degrees, the temperature inside a car can climb to 125 degrees in only 20 minutes, and 140 degrees in just 40 minutes.

Paul says kids can be in danger even if the temperature outside the car is as low as 60 degrees.

"Parents just don't know that the car can turn into an inferno in a very short period of time based on the darkened interiors of a car, how intense the sunshine might be, where the temperature begins and how it would rise quickly," she said. "Any forensic expert would say there is no safe time in a car for a child."

Paul says even if kids are rescued from a car and survive, there is a good chance they could be left with brain damage.

"This is the kind of data we're just starting to capture," she says. "There are probably more incidents of near-deaths than we even know about. … No time is tolerable [for kids alone] in a car."