John Lehm
A young child has died in tragic circumstances, apparently forgotten all day in a hot car by a father who mistakenly thought the child had been dropped off at daycare.
The incident, which occurred Wednesday in Saint-Jérôme, about 65 kilometres northwest of Montreal, is being investigated by the Sûreté du Québec.
Audrey-Anne Bilodeau, a spokeswoman for the SQ, would not provide any details other than to say the death is being investigated, and that does not necessarily imply a crime has been committed.
"An autopsy will be performed in the coming days to determine the exact cause of death of the toddler," she said. Police would not provide any details about the child, but media reports say that it was a boy under the age of one.
According to the TVA television network, the father of three children headed out with them on Wednesday morning.
He dropped two children off at a day camp and then, normally, he would drop the baby off at a daycare, the Centre de la petite enfance Notre-Dame in Saint-Jérôme.
Late in the afternoon, the father arrived at the daycare only to be told his child had never been dropped off.
He returned to his car to find the baby dead in the car seat, TVA reported. Saint-Jérôme police turned the case over to the SQ because, under Quebec law, all deaths of children under the age of six are investigated by the provincial police.
The case is eerily similar to a July, 2003, incident in which 23-month-old Audrey Dubé-Martin died of hyperthermia after her father forgot the sleeping toddler in a sweltering car and went off to work. The girl's father, Dominic Martin, was originally charged with manslaughter, but the criminal case was later dropped when the Crown decided it was a tragic mistake any reasonable person could make.
In the United States, an average of 37 children die annually after being forgotten in hot cars; almost all of them are under the age of three. There are no Canadian statistics.
The U.S. data show that the number of hot-car deaths has risen steadily since 1990, when cars began to be equipped with passenger-side air bags and parents, concerned about injuries, began to routinely put car seats in the back.
The temperature in a closed car rises dramatically in a short time. On a day when the outside temperature is 35 C – roughly what it was in the Montreal area on Wednesday – the inside of a car rises to 50 C within 20 minutes and exceeds 65 C within 40 minutes, according to the Canada Safety Council. Dr. Oded Bar-Or, director of the Children's Exercise and Nutrition Centre at McMaster University in Hamilton, said extreme heat affects infants and small children more quickly and dramatically than adults.
Because of their size, their core temperature can increase three to five times faster than that of an adult. Hyperthermia – also known as heat stroke – occurs when the body's core temperature reaches 40.5 C.
André Picard