Cops: Grandparents Forgot Baby in Hot Car

Ga. boy was left in SUV for hours after church
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Sep 8, 2015 1:24 AM CDT
Cops: Grandparents Forgot Baby in Hot Car
Stock photo   (Shutterstock)

A baby in northwest Georgia is dead because the three adults who were supposed to be looking after him all thought somebody else had taken him inside, police say. Instead, 11-month-old Jaxon Taylor died inside a hot SUV after being left there for more than two hours on Saturday afternoon when his grandparents and an aunt came back from church in Chickamauga, 11Alive reports. He was discovered only after his mother, an emergency room nurse who was working night shifts, woke up and asked where the boy was. Police say that after running out to find the boy still in his car seat, the mother tried to revive him with cold water and CPR but he was pronounced dead at the hospital.

"There was a lack of communication [with] the three adults," Walker County Sheriff Steve Wilson tells CNN. "They assumed that one of the others had brought in the child and laid him down. They didn't communicate who would get the child." He says the boy had been left in the car at a time when the heat hit 90 degrees, and the inside of a hot car could reach "172 degrees in as little as 15 minutes." He says the death appears to be accidental, but investigators are keeping an "open mind." This is the 19th death of a child in a hot car in the US so far this year, 11Alive reports. The safety organization KidsandCars.org says there are 38 such deaths in an average year, the New York Daily News notes. (Cops in NJ had to smash a minivan window to rescue a young girl.)

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