Heat fuels danger for children in cars

Summer heat, cars and kids have proven to be a lethal combination time and time again.

The latest example of this was Sunday in Corona, Calif., where a 6-month-old was left in a car for three hours as interior temperatures reached 130 degrees.

The parents had just returned from church and rushed inside to catch a ringing phone, leaving the child in the car with the windows closed. The baby died of heat exhaustion, investigators said.

"We get a lot of calls in the summer from people who have accidentally locked their kids in the car," Las Vegas Fire Department Chief Ken Riddle said. "The danger is the quickness that heat can build up in a car."

A study done in 1996 in Laughlin to determine summer temperatures inside cars showed that it does not take long for a car to become too hot for people. Temperatures in the cars registered between 150 and 165 degrees, and paramedics at the tests said those temperatures were reached in about 15 minutes.

When rescue crews respond to a call of a child locked in a car, they try not to damage the vehicle, but sometimes it is necessary, Riddle said.

"We carry Slim Jim kits on some of our trucks, and we try to use those if it is not a dangerous situation," Riddle said. "But if it is a life-threatening situation, we'll break out a window to get the child out."

Last year in May through September, rescue crews from North Las Vegas, Henderson, Las Vegas and Clark Country responded to 135 calls for children locked in cars.

The most recent incident of a child dying because of the heat in a car in Las Vegas was on July 7. A 7-month-old infant died after spending the day in the back of a panel truck that had no air conditioning, investigators said.

The child's mother, Elvira Guardado-Gonzales, and her boyfriend, Armondo Gonzales, both face second-degree murder charges after leaving the baby in the truck as they drove around town looking for recyclable material to sell for cash.

In May a Philadelphia woman left her 9-month-old child in a car for four hours, and by the time she remembered her infant, the child was dead.

Unlike the Gonzales case, the woman in Philadelphia was not prosecuted because it was determined that there was no criminal negligence in the case, Montgomery County District Attorney Michael Marino said.

A parent's criminal negligence is the deciding factor in whether such cases are prosecuted, Clark County District Attorney Stewart Bell said.

"To be criminally negligent, you have to knowingly do something that you know, or should know, would put someone in danger," Bell said.

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