No Malice, No Ill Will, No Intention....

No Malice, No Ill Will, No Intention....

An autopsy showed the child had been exposed to "high-level temperatures." Another tragic misadventure to put a tragedy into the perspective of busy lifestyles and seasonal temperatures. Of course forgetting a child strapped securely into its child-seat on the back seat of a car in mid-winter can result in death as well. In the winter, death can be caused by extreme low temperatures, the child freezing to death. In the summer months, however, the cause is heat.

Children have been 'forgotten' and left on school buses, the bus driver temporarily 'forgetting' that the last thing he must do is take a quick run through the bus to ensure that no child has been left behind. It is one of the primary rules to ensure that no dreadful misadventure occurs. What could be more awful than confronting a parent rushing to pick up a child after work, and to have to tell that mother or father that no one knows where the child is.

A desperate search discovering the whereabouts of the child. Locked into a bus parked until its service is next required hours later, the child forgotten, too young to know what to do, unable to raise anyone's attention, for no one is around and the child is locked securely into the bus. Perhaps what is far more common and worse by far is the parent forgetting that they were to have delivered the child to nursery school, pre-school or junior kindergarten.

Sometimes the double-check and the telephoned alert to the parent that the child has not arrived as expected does not work. It obviously did not when a Texas mother meeting her husband for lunch asked whether daycare teachers had remarked approvingly of the outfit she had dressed their one-year-old daughter in. The horrified father suddenly recalling he hadn't delivered the child, but left her in the parked car. Their desperate rush to the scene, to find their daughter dying in the workplace parking lot, a crowd trying to revive her.

"It's really tough to read essentially the same story. It's just a devastating thing to live through", Kristie Cavaliero said, of the ongoing incidents of children forgotten because someone's mind was so very busy with a multitude of other thoughts and responsibilities. What might conceivably transcend the importance of the responsibility due the safety and security of a vulnerable child? Well, nothing, of course, but the human mind and memory does have its faults.

Outside Toronto, a two-year-old boy was left inside a vehicle. The child died after spending "an extended period of time" alone. He had been left in a car parked outside a family home. Halton Regional Police informed the media that the child had been in the care of his maternal grandmother. His mother had an appointment to keep, his father was busy at work, and his five-year-old sister was where she should be; at school.

Twenty-four hours afterward police were called to a commercial parking lot in Markham, Ontario, also close to Toronto. To pry open a parked-car window so a two-year-old child left inside the  weather-heated car could be released. The little girl was taken to hospital while police arrested her 32-year-old mother on a charge of child abandonment.

"Hot car deaths" appear to be on the rise in North America. In the United States there were four such tragedies in 1991. In 2010 there were 49. It is estimated that an average of 38 deaths due to temporarily neglect or forgetfulness occur with children being left alone in parked cars, in the U.S. "For the silent majority of folks who read these stories, it scares them to death. They might not say so, but many of them have had close calls", explains Ms. Cavaliero.

A spokesperson at Canada Safety Council estimates an average of four to six deaths annually in Canada. In August 2010 a Toronto toddler died after having been left in an SUV outside a home for almost two hours. A family trip to the grocery store had ended with the parents' attention caught by an emergency, the child's older autistic brother requiring immediate attention. In the ensuing emergency, the toddler sitting in the back seat was forgotten.

Hot car deaths, stressed a Halifax lawyer who founded the Canadian chapter of Kids and Cars, a non-profit organization geared to addressing this dreadful situation, stressed that "almost universally" hot-car deaths "are not failures of love, but failures of memory". Such a failure is physically and psychologically catastrophic. The child dies, the parent is left with a lifetime of guilty regret, an anguished remorseful pain that will never heal.