Parenting

4-Year-Old Calls 911 After He & 6 Other Toddlers Are Locked in a Hot Car

ParentingPublished May 14, 2019
By Marsha Takeda-Morrison
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A quick-thinking 4-year-old may have saved his own life and the lives of six other children who were all locked in a hot car. A Maryland woman who left them there while she went shopping has been arrested.

On Friday, police in Maryland got a call from a child who told a 911 dispatcher that he and six other children had been left in a car by themselves.

The Charles County Sheriff's Office said in a statement that the child indicated he didn’t know where he was, but authorities were able to trace the call to a parking lot in a mall.

There they found seven children ages 2 to 4, unattended and in the vehicle with the windows rolled up.

Authorities said that the children had been left alone for at least 20 minutes.

The kids were "scared" and “sweaty” according to WJLA7, and temperatures in the area had gotten up to about 80 degrees.

The inside temperature of a car can rise almost 20 degrees within the first 10 minutes, notes the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)

"Officers helped the children out of the vehicle and Charles County Fire/EMS provided treatment on the scene," the sheriff's office said in its statement.

Within 10 minutes of police arriving, a 37-year-old woman returned to the car and was arrested and charged with confinement of children inside a motor vehicle.

Authorities say she is the mother of two of the children and was babysitting the others.

"It is against the law to leave a child under the age of 8 unattended inside a motor vehicle if the caregiver is out of sight of the child unless a reliable person at least 13-years-old remains with the child," the sheriff's office said. 

"It is also dangerous to leave anyone, including pets, inside a motor vehicle especially as outside temperatures become warmer. The temperature inside a parked car can quickly rise to extremely high and even fatal levels in a short period of time,” the statement continued.

To protect the identities of the children, authorities are not releasing the woman’s name. Additional charges are pending against her, according to the sheriff’s office.

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