- A one-year-old child died after being left all day in a hot car in Texas, police say.
- The child’s mother told police she thought she had dropped the toddler at daycare.
- The mother will face immediate charges, or the case will be sent to a grand jury, local media reported.
A one-year-old in Texas died after she was left by her mother in a hot car in Texas for over 9 hours, local police said.
According to tweets from Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzales, the mother of three dropped off two older children at daycare that morning, but she took her one-year-old home with her on Thursday.
“The initial report is that the mother had three children, ages five, three, and one, that she was going to take to daycare,” Sergeant Ben Beall said at a press conference regarding the matter on Thursday. “She dropped off the five-year-old and the three-year-old but apparently left the one-year-old child in the vehicle.”
“She returned home, apparently went inside the house, came back out, went to exercise, came home,” Beall went on to say.
The female toddler was left in her mother’s Honda Civic from 8:30 am to 6:00 pm. It was 90 degrees in Texas on Thursday, according to People.
The mother has said she did not realize her daughter was not at daycare until she went to pick up her five and three-year-old in a different car, where she also asked for her one-year-old, according to the same press conference.
“The daycare had no record of the one-year-old being dropped off,” Beall said.
According to People, the mother and the supervisor of the daycare went back to her house when they realized the child’s location was unknown, and they then searched the car, finding the child in the backseat.
The child’s body was discovered on the floorboards, as police deputies told ABC 13. She was declared dead on Thursday evening.
The mother will either face immediate charges, or the case will be sent to a grand jury, as police deputies told ABC 13. A decision had not been made at the time of writing.
According to USA Today, Texas has the hottest car deaths of any state, and the one-year-old is the 20th child to die in a hot car in 2021.
On September 1, a set of twin 20-month olds died after being left in a hot car for over nine hours in South Carolina.