Howard County police are continuing to investigate the circumstances surrounding a child left forgotten in a car seat who died of hyperthermia in a stifling vehicle.
A neighbor found the 23-month old Ellicott City girl strapped in a car seat in a vehicle parked outside her home one week ago, police said Wednesday, apparently after her mother forgot she had left the toddler there about nine hours earlier. The identity of the child and her parents have not been released, but police said the girl was found in front of a home in the 3100 block of Edgewood Drive.
Child care experts say such tragedies may happen precisely because they're so horrifying a prospect that parents can't imagine it happening and don't take precautions that could help prevent it.
"It takes acknowledgment, and it is one of the things that parents least want to acknowledge," said Dr. Laura Jana, an Omaha-based pediatrician who wrote the book, Heading Home With Your Newborn: From Birth to Reality. "It's the last thing you ever want to imagine happening, and we push it away as if 'it could never happen to me.'
"I don't think our brains want us to be able to imagine us doing something like that to our child," said Jana, a spokeswoman for the American Academy of Pediatrics and the mother of three. "Denial is a very powerful thing."
In other cases in which children have died forgotten in parked cars, parents have been charged with neglect or even manslaughter. The Ellicott City mother has not been charged, and Howard County police spokeswoman Sherry Llewellyn said in a statement that she likely woun't be if the incident is "determined to be accidental,"
Howard State's Attorney Dario J. Broccolino said the decision whether to file charges rests with the police. But he added that his office would review the findings to determine whether the incident needed further inquiry.
"It's so fact-specific," Broccolino said. "There are a million variables in these kind of cases."
Paraphrasing the famous remark of former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, Broccolino added, "It's like pornography. I'll know it [if it's criminal] when I see it. I have to look at the report."
Police said Tuesday that a "a change in routine" in the parents' schedule led to the child being put in her car seat and left unattended for most of the day. Through Llewellyn, Police Chief William McMahon declined comment pending the outcome of the investigation.
