Baby dies after mom ‘forgot’ the boy in a car in shopping plaza parking lot, cops say

The mother whose 1-year old son died after she left him in a car at a Bird Road shopping center “inadvertently forgot the infant child,” police said Thursday.

The mother, Maidelmys Llaca, 26, went to work in a beauty salon at the Bird Road Shoppes, 9540 Bird Road, police said.

The baby may have been in the car for about four hours, according to Miami Herald news partner CBS4.

“I heard some screaming in the back, so I went running to see what was going on and there was a bunch of people outside,” pharmacist Juan Carmenat told CBS4. “The baby was on the floor. It was already pale and looking out, it was already purple. He wasn’t responding.”

Miami-Dade Fire Rescue took the infant to an area hospital, where he died, police said.

According to police, several calls came in just before 1 p.m. reporting that there was “an unresponsive child’’ at the shopping plaza. The center’s tenants include a beauty salon, a barbershop, a cafeteria and watch repair, according to a Google Street View as of May 2017.

The boy’s death is the first death in the United States this year due to heat stroke in a vehicle, according to www.KidsAndCars.org. Last year, there were 43 deaths related to being left in a car in 2017, according to the the group that tracks such deaths.

Miami Herald staff writer Martin Vassolo contributed to this report.

This story was originally published February 28, 2018 at 4:09 PM with the headline "Baby dies after mom ‘forgot’ the boy in a car in shopping plaza parking lot, cops say."