Demonstration Turns Up Heat on Children Left in Cars

Within seconds, the temperature had climbed five degrees.

Minutes later, it was 15 degrees hotter.

And by the end of Tuesday’s demonstration, the temperature inside a locked car had risen to around 150 degrees, more than 40 degrees hotter than the noontime temperature in the parking lot of Carousel Mall in San Bernardino.

Tuesday’s “Too Hot for Tot” simulation was an effort to remind the public of the dangers of leaving a child behind in a car – in any temperature. The demonstration was staged by the Safe Kids Coalition of the Inland Empire in conjunction with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, San Bernardino City Fire, San Bernardino Police and American Medical Response.

While Tuesday’s demonstration came on a typical Inland Empire summer day, with temperatures soaring about 100 degrees, organizers said that summer is not the only time children might be in danger.

“We don’t want people to think that the danger exists when the weather is warm,” said Clark E. Morrow, of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department. “Children have been known to die in locked cars even when the temperatures are in the 70s when the day is cloudy. An infant can die in as little as 15 minutes, even on a mild 75 degree day.”

Nationwide, 49 children died in 2010 of hyperthermia due to being trapped in a car, the worst on record, according to SafeKids USA. About half of the children who died were forgotten by parents, while others were playing in the car and got locked in and others were intentionally left for “just a minute.”

In the first five months of 2011, eight children died of heat stroke in vehicles. Since 1998, when officials started keeping records of these incidents, more than 500 children have died in heat incidents.

“What a lot of people don’t realize is that heat is more dangerous to children than it is to adults,” Morrow said during the demonstration. “A child’s body core temperature can increase three to five times faster than that of an adult. The same thing applies to dogs and cats left in hot cars. Generally speaking, the smaller the body, the quicker the damage done to that body by extreme heat.”

The demonstration began when a distracted mother, portrayed by Jennifer Reyes, of Redlands, left her child strapped into its car seat in the back of her car to do some shopping. After about five minutes, volunteer passersby noticed the child and called 911.

A police officer notified the fire department, which knocked out the car’s window, and removed the child for treatment with the ambulance, as the mother returned to the car to be questioned by police.

In 2002, it became a citable offense to leave a child 6 and younger unattended in a vehicle without the supervision of someone age 12 and older. “Kaitlyn’s Law,” which was named for a Corona girl who died of heat stroke at 6 months after being left behind in her babysitter’s van in August 2000, can bring felony charges of criminal negligence or intentional harm to a child depending on the circumstances.