Another Florida hot-car death of a child: How does this keep happening? | Opinion

Horrifyingly, it has happened again. A South Florida child has been found dead in a car in the sweltering summer heat.

That’s the second child in a week. First, it was an 18-month-old who died. His father tried to pick him up from an early learning center in Plantation last Monday only to make the terrible discovery that the boy had been left in the back seat of the hot car all day. The child and his older brother both attended the school.

More recently, on Sunday, a 2-year-old died inside a hot car in Hallandale Beach while in the care of a babysitter. Temperatures reached 90 degrees in Hallandale Beach that day, with heat indexes reaching 100 degrees or more.

Hallandale Beach Police spokeswoman Grace Mariot called the death a “heartbreaking loss.” It certainly is that — and much more. It’s one of the worst nightmares for any parent, an unspeakable tragedy, a moment of human failing like no other.

In a Florida summer — especially in recent years — the temperatures in a car quickly become unforgiving. The steering wheel can be too hot to touch, the air like an oven. The Hallandale Beach toddler is at least the 10th child to die in a hot car in the nation this year, according to the education and public awareness group Kids and Car Safety. The deaths aren’t just in steamy climates like Florida — they span the country from Pennsylvania to Tennessee to California.

In more than half of hot car deaths, the group said, the person responsible for the child unknowingly left them in the car. “It can happen to anyone,” the Kids and Car Safety website says.

That’s the terrifying thing about hot-car deaths: The situation is often very ordinary, mundane. Sleep-deprived parents are doing their best with complicated daycare and work schedules. In the two recent South Florida cases, investigations are under way to find out what happened.

The parents in the Plantation case had been taking turns bringing the children to the daycare center, a juggling act many parents know all too well. On the day of the child’s death, the parents had already told the center the older sibling would not be there, the Sun Sentinel reported. When the younger child was absent too, no one at the center thought anything was wrong.

The boy’s father was supposed to drop him off but forgot and drove to work. After work, he drove to the daycare to pick up his child and put him in the car seat. “He opened the door, then slammed it shut,” Leslie Novoa, director and owner of A World of Discovery Academy, told the South Florida Sun Sentinel. “And he let out this scream.”

There are tips and tricks to make sure you check the back seat in cars in all weather but especially when it’s this hot. Some cars have built-in electronic warnings. There are other ideas, too: Put your phone or another essential item in the back seat whenever you put a child in the back, as a prompt to make sure you don’t forget them. The same goes for pets: When the weather is this hot, there is no safe amount of time to leave them in the car with the air-conditioning off.

In the end, though, all the tips and routines in the world can’t prevent every tragedy. Humans are fallible and sometimes the worst happens. As Hallandale police told the Sentinel, “One last look can save a child’s life.”