Diana Rodriguez, 18, has the dubious distinction of kicking off this year’s round of bad parents whose children die because they get left in a car for hours on end. Rodriguez left her baby in her car for 7 1/2 hours while she worked her shift at McDonald’s. According to the Associated Press story, the autopsy on the 13-month old infant indicated that temperatures in her car reached upward of 130 degrees.
Police have charged here with child abuse resulting in the death of a child, and she was released after someone put up her $25,000 bond.
Rodriguez won’t be the last. I couldn’t find any solid statistic on how many children die this way, but in a typical summer I see about 15 to 20 of these sorts of news stories. Typically the deaths fall into two categories: a) parents who forget that their child is in their car, and b) parents who don’t think it’s wrong to leave their child unattended in the car, often for hours on end as Rodriguez did.
The most disgusting case I read about of the latter type involved a man who was scheduled to go mushroom hunting with a friend. At the last minute, his wife, who was going to watch his daughter while he was scouring for mushrooms, was called into work and so the man took the daughter with him on the mushroom hunt. While he and the friend scoured a cave for about 6 hours looking for mushrooms, the child was in her car seat in a locked car with all of the windows up. In Arizona. In August.
Some of the people I’ve talked about this topic with think I’m a bit too “law and order” on this, but aside from the sheer idiocy of such preventable deaths, the thing that really gets under my skin is that there is almost never any real punishment for such acts. It is very unlikely, for example, that Rodriguez will spend any time at all in jail. In some cases, in fact, grand juries have refused to indict parents whose children died in such incidents, on the theory that the parent has suffered enough by knowing that he or she caused the child’s death through negligence. (Which to me always sounds like the classic legal example of a man asking for lenience from the court for killing his parents because the murder has suddenly left him an orphan).
Consider the case of Gail and Julius Baker. Their 10-day old daughter, Joy, died after Mrs. Baker left the girl in a car for 7 hours. Where was she during that period? Playing video poker in a South Carolina game room. Rather than blame his wife for her obvious negligence, Julius blamed the gambling industry and led a successful campaign to outlaw video poker in South Carolina. Gail Baker? She received a sentence of 5 years probation.