Thread: OMG This makes me SICK!

Those were my biggest fears as a mom. Forgetting the car seat on the hood or trunkj of the car and driving away, or forgetting them in the grocery cart. I never got in the car without another look and I was always counting babies. How this happens is beyond me.

Me

I wonder if having to put the car seat in the backseat could be the reason the deaths have increased? The car seat law was in effect the year my son was born, but we didn't have to strap them in the back seat and no one told us to. I think the main issue then was to be sure a small infant was turned backwards in the seat so that they didn't face toward the dash. So my son was always stapped in beside me, unless someone was in the car with me.

I put an analysis on this page about it.
http://www.bigbigforums.com/showthread.php3?t=516599

Its sad but true that sometimes children are forgotten if they are sleeping or playing even. When my daughter was 2 she went with her dad to his sisters house. He said he was almost back home when he realized he had forgotten her, she had been outside playing with the other children, out of sight out of mind??? It's sad but still true that sometimes people do forget they have their child with them.

What gets me is I don't think I've ever heard a judge say, when someone kills a grown person, that the person that did it will have to live with what they've done so lets just give them probation. But they do that a lot when babies are involved. Remember when the nanny shook the baby and it died? The jury found her guilty but the judge overturned their verdict and set her free. I never did understand his reason for that. I really feel that pepole have reduced babies to non-human or something or why would they give no sentences for killing them. You kill a grown person you go to jail but kill a baby and you just get probation. Thats really sad to me because babies are the most defenseless people there is and they only have us to make sure they're taken care of. And a lot of times it seems like the judges send the message that they're life wasn't worth anything or why give the killers no jail time.

Originally Posted by justme23

I called my grandmother today to ask her if she knew this man. She didn't know him personally but said he does go to her church. Anyways, she says everyone speaks highly of this man and she thinks he will never go to prison, I assured her he probably would. She also said that after they put him in jail his wife stood in the lobby and said "tell him I love him," which makes her a much better woman than I probably would be if put in the same situation.

I do think it is quite apparent that he did genuinely forget, since it says in the OP that he called to have someone check on his way back to Lindale (canton is a pretty long drive from Lindale, about an 45 minutes if you do the speed limit). I feel sorry for everyone involved, especially this baby but even this man. Everyone wants everyone else to not judge until they've walked a mile in their shoes but very few ppl are willing to extend the same courtesy. I know what it is to forget, I have left a child behind (not in a sweltering car and he didn't die) w/out thinking and I felt like pure dog sh*t for doing it but I DID genuinely forget and I didn't remember until his stepmother (not his stepmother at the time, but acted as it) said to me "where's Christopher". We were both sleeping when she called and said "come pick me up from work, hurry up", I jumped up and went in a hurry and I wasn't thinking. Well, thankfully when we got there he was still in his bed taking his nap and he never knew what happened. I doubt very much that I am the only person here that has forgotten, I'm probably just the only one that would admit it.

I'll admit it! My husband & I BOTH forgot our now 6 yr old son one day(he was 3 at the time), I thought he was with his dad, he thought he was with me, My hubby left to get his hair cut and I had taken the other 3 kids to the mall, hubby got home first and found Steven fast asleep on our bed with 2 juice boxes and a box of cheerios next to him. we both felt like dog crap for weeks, and Stevie got VEERRRRY spoiled during that time, but THANK GOD nothing bad happened to him!!! Parents, no matter how much we love them, CAN AND DO make mistakes.

Yes, parents are prone to mistakes too; but I'm wondering, did he forget to take the child to daycare first? And if not, it seems it was his intent to leave the child in the vehicle. Maybe things just took longer than he anticipated?

There are parents though who did it intentionally. A mother of two in the town I reside in was the first case of this scenario I had ever heard of. It happened in 1995. She left her one year old and 23 month old in the car while she went into a local hotel room to "hang out" with some guys but then fell asleep. Before doing so, she checked on them, propped their bottles up, etc. So it was her full intent to leave them in the car. When she returned to the car later in the day, they had both died.

My ex-husband was working as a police officer at that time and was on the scene. He said that both children had gotten so hot that they had pulled clumps of hair out of their heads that was still in their little hands. The milk in the bottles had soured. The temperature outside the car was 94 degrees, but the temp inside the car was 121 degrees. Both had died slow, suffocating deaths while still strapped into their carseats.

I don't think the 18 years she received was enough. She's come up for parole a couple of times and both times denied. I hope they make her serve every single day of that 18 years; and then she still ought to consider herself lucky that's all she had to serve!