Photo: KidsAndCars
Another day, another tragic story of a child being left behind in a hot car to disastrous consequences. The child’s mother is being charged with murder.
Elizabeth Marie Barhonovich from Mississippi is currently in police custody, after refusing to enter a plea at trial and being denied bail, People Magazine reports. She is accused of second-degree murder, after leaving her toddler son in the car, parked outside the family home.
Barhonovich has no legal representation and has not spoken to the media about the tragedy. Police reports indicate that she left her 10-month-old son in the car last month and he died from vehicular hypertermia.
The boy was left in the car alone for “an unknown length of time,” the report says. Temperatures that day reached record highs.
“Records show temperatures reached 90 degrees on the day Kash died. The heat index was 98 degrees,” the publication notes.
Vehicular hypertermia remains the number one cause of vehicular death in children under 14 in the US: on average, 37 children die annually because their parents or caregivers deliberately or accidentally leave them in locked cars, in hot temperatures.
A locked car left out in the son acts pretty much like an oven, and temperatures reach life-threatening quotas in minutes. Leaving the windows rolled down doesn’t help at all, so the solution to preventing such tragedies is to not leave the kids in the car. Not even for a few minutes.
For parents who are too tired or too busy, activists recommend using visual cues as reminders. For instance, you can place a toy in the child’s seat when he’s not with you, and move it to the front seat, in plain sight, when you take him with you. This way, you will be reminded to look in the backseat for the kid before leaving.
Barhonovich has no legal representation and has not spoken to the media about the tragedy. Police reports indicate that she left her 10-month-old son in the car last month and he died from vehicular hypertermia.
The boy was left in the car alone for “an unknown length of time,” the report says. Temperatures that day reached record highs.
“Records show temperatures reached 90 degrees on the day Kash died. The heat index was 98 degrees,” the publication notes.
Vehicular hypertermia remains the number one cause of vehicular death in children under 14 in the US: on average, 37 children die annually because their parents or caregivers deliberately or accidentally leave them in locked cars, in hot temperatures.
A locked car left out in the son acts pretty much like an oven, and temperatures reach life-threatening quotas in minutes. Leaving the windows rolled down doesn’t help at all, so the solution to preventing such tragedies is to not leave the kids in the car. Not even for a few minutes.
For parents who are too tired or too busy, activists recommend using visual cues as reminders. For instance, you can place a toy in the child’s seat when he’s not with you, and move it to the front seat, in plain sight, when you take him with you. This way, you will be reminded to look in the backseat for the kid before leaving.
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