CINCINNATI—A baby found dead in a sweltering minivan marks at least the 29th time a child died this year after being left in a hot car, ahead of last year’s pace for such deaths, child safety advocates said Thursday.
Prosecutors have not decided whether to file charges against Jodie Edwards, a counseling professor from Cincinnati Christian University who police said left her 11-month-old daughter Jenna in a car seat while she worked Wednesday. It’s the second straight year the child of a Cincinnati-area educator died in a hot car near the beginning of the school year.
Last August, an assistant middle school principal left her 2-year-old daughter strapped in a car seat in a sport utility vehicle for eight hours as temperatures neared 100 degrees. The child was the 22nd to die of hyperthermia, or heat-related causes, in a car at that point last year, according to researchers. The woman said she changed her routine that morning and thought she had dropped the toddler off with a baby sitter. No charges were filed.
Edwards called 911 at about 4:30 p.m. Wednesday to report her daughter was dead in the back of her Honda Odyssey, less than an hour after the temperature reached 90 degrees.
“I went out to my car a few minutes ago and realized that I left my baby in there and she died,” said Edwards, 34.
Police interviewed Edwards and her husband, and the Hamilton County coroner’s office performed an autopsy. Authorities would not comment Thursday about their findings.
The university hosted a prayer meeting and released a statement Thursday, calling the death a terrible accident and describing Edwards as a beloved professor and devoted mother.
“This painful situation tests our faith, but doesn’t destroy it,” the university said.
Jenna Edwards’ death is among nearly 400 child deaths due to being left in hot cars across the country during the past decade, said Jan Null, an adjunct meteorology professor at San Francisco State University who began tracking the number when one case happened in that area years ago.
A 2007 Associated Press investigation of many of those deaths found that prosecution and penalties against the people responsible varied widely depending on where the deaths happened and which parent or caretaker was blamed. Charges were filed in about half of the cases.
Of the deaths Null has tracked, about 20 percent were children abandoned intentionally and 30 percent accidentally got stuck in cars or trunks. Half occurred when parents accidentally forgot about a child, Null said.
This month, Null found reports of at least six heat-related child car deaths, from the Houston-area towns of Cypress and Webster to one Tuesday in northern Delaware. And he’s researching four more potential cases in suburban Phoenix and Denver.
Such deaths used to happen only a few times a year. Now, two dozen or more occur annually—partly as an unintended consequence of legislation intended to make children safer in the mid-1990s, said Janette Fennell, founder and president of Kids and Cars, a Kansas-based safety advocacy group that tracks the deaths. After public outcry over airbag-related injuries, new requirements forced children to ride in the back seat, outside their parents’ field of vision.
The cases of forgotten children often involve loving parents plagued by three factors, she said: miscommunication between caretakers, the “out of sight, out of mind” principle and a change in the parents’ routine. In some cases, it’s as simple as one parent taking a child to daycare instead of the other, ending up on a road detour or being otherwise distracted and forgetting about the change.
Another common thread is that parents believe it could never happen to them.
“Everyone’s very quick to judge and say they could never do this,” Fennell said. “This issue has so much more to do with how our memory works or doesn’t work than anything else.”
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