Mom Accused of Leaving Crying, Sweating Kids in Hot Car Charged

A 37-year-old Canton woman was cited for child neglect after police said she left her three children in a hot car for at least 20 minutes while she shopped in an Office Max store.

The woman, whose name hasn’t been released, told police that she was only left the children alone for a couple of minutes, but surveillance video of the parking lot indicated the children were in the Honda Civic, with only a window slightly opened, for 20 minutes, The Observer & Eccentric reports.

The temperature was 81 degrees and humidity was at 87 percent when police, called to the store parking lot at 43165 Ford Road by a witness, arrived. The children – ages 5 and 7 years and 11 months – were crying and sweating, according to the report.

It wasn’t immediately known if Child Protective Services was called to investigate.

The report from Canton is the latest in a deluge of reports of children being left in hot cars. At least 15 children have died so far this year of what’s being called “vehicular heatstroke,” which annually claims about 38 children a year, according to a report on Salon.com.

Other sources put the number at 23 this year, including one in Michigan. In July, a 5-year-old Port Huron boy with Down Syndrome wandered off from his home and was found dead in a neighbor’s hot car hours later after an intense search.

The Salon.com story suggested that while the number of deaths is down this year, media interest may be up after a sensational account in Georgia, where a child died after being left in a hot car for 20 hours by his father, who was “sexting” women and talking about his desire for “a child-free life.”

In her analysis for Salon.com, staff writer Mary Elizabeth Williams said a case like the one in Georgia – where Justin Ross Harris faces felony murder and second-degree child cruelty charges in the death of his 22-month-old son, Cooper – “triggers all kinds of feelings in the public imagination.”

“Initially, it can’t help but incite the nightmare that many of us who’ve ever been new parents share: the fear of doing something – or not doing something – in a moment of supreme exhaustion and unintentionally hurting one’s own child,” she wrote. “ And then it turns into a crime mystery, and the puzzle of whether a person would cold-bloodedly leave a defenseless toddler to die.

“The subsequent barrage of similar stories has played upon the same emotions the Harris tale conjures – and the questions of how we parent.”