2 Texas children die in hot car

[sarisataka]

Two young children were found dead Friday in Parker County, Texas, in what appeared to be a hot car incident.

According to a news release from the sheriff's office, the mother of the children -- a 2-year-old girl and a 16-month-old boy -- found them in a locked vehicle.

The Tarrant County medical examiner's website identified the children as Juliet and Cavanaugh Ramirez.

Parker County Sheriff's Capt. Mark Arnett told CNN that according to the mother, the children were playing in a back room of their home when they disappeared. After searching the home, the mother began looking outside, where she eventually found them locked inside the car.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/26/us/texas-hot-car-deaths-children/index.html

Very sad, but some questions need to be answered...

[phylny]

1. Such an avoidable tragedy but I am skeptical.

Two-year-old children would have a very hard time opening a car door, entering the car, closing the door without getting hurt/caught, and then locking it.

My two-year-olds and younger were under constant supervision unless they were sleeping, and then we gated their doors.

Nonetheless, I'm sad for the kids and family.

[SaschaHM]

2. I wonder what the exact age of the 2 year old was.

I too am skeptical of parts of this story, but having watched a 2 year old develop, there are things that they can't do at 25 months that they can do easily at 32 months.

If your 2 year old is developed enough that they can open house doors (mine was), you need to watch them like a hawk.

[dixiegrrrrl]

5. My 2 year old managed to take a Philips screwdriver and remove parts of our jeep

He also managed to open the front door and stand by the street.
"watching the lights, Momma".
Momma locked house doors after that.

BUT...at age 2, neither of my lil geniuses could open a car door, esp. if it were an SUV.
and not with car keys and a cellphone in their lil hands.

[NCDem777]

3. It was murder

People don't just forget they have kids with em.

[politicat]

4. Read the article.

The story at this point is the children got past their mother and went out to the parked car to play. The family wasn't in transit anywhere. The family left the car unlocked, the elder child knew how to open the door. They probably couldn't open the door out to the first hold point, so the door closed itself. Then either one of them hit the autolock or couldn't open the door. That's all too possible. Always lock the car doors, even in one's own driveway.

But on the greater point: I was one of those babies. My mother forgot me in the car when I was 4 months old. I was a difficult baby. I didn't sleep well, I was nocturnal, mother was trying to stay in school (she had just finished her first semester of college when I was born), work part time, and be a single parent in the rural Midwest in the 70s when Good Girls from Good Families just did not do that. I'd fallen asleep in the back seat of her car (it was the 70s, I was little, Mom transported me in a Moses basket. At least she used the seatbelt...) after what my great-grandparents later described as a particularly bad night, and my mother was a zombie that day. She forgot to drop me off with my great-aunt, my great-aunt assumed that either my grandmother or my great-grandparents had me (because that had happened before), nobody called anyone else to confirm, and Mother went to class, then her job (on campus).

I got very lucky. That happened to be a cool, wet, cloudy spring. The outside temps were in the high 40s, the car wasn't much warmer. I slept for several hours, then woke up hungry and wet and angry as only a baby can be. A passerby heard me and broke the wing window to get me out, took me into the student union, prepped one of the bottles in my bag, fed me, changed me and soothed me, while my mother was found. I ended up with a bad case of diaper rash and a mother who was forever after paranoid about cars and babies. With good reason.

People DO forget. It's a hideous, horrible, terrible, perfect storm of exhaustion and attention fault and distraction and it can happen to anyone -- anyone who has ever driven to work and not remembered it, or left their coffee cup on the roof, or auto-piloted themselves to their kid's school during summer break has experienced the exact memory subroutine fault that leads to children left in cars by accident. For all of my mother's faults, she wasn't homicidal, just exhausted and her brain's subroutines took over.

[marlakay]

6. What a story

I am surprised she told you, i would have been to guilty and not wanted my child to know.

Did someone else tell you?

[politicat]

8. Mother did tell, but minimized it. Grandmother, g-grandmother and g-aunt gave details.

Yes, mother was deeply ashamed. But her mother, grandmother and aunt were not about to let her forget it, not about to let it be buried. (My mother has issues. So does the rest of the family.) The family did not approve of my mother keeping me. They thought she was too young and irresponsible, and my day in the car was just more proof of it. They wouldn't let it go. (I suspect, but have no proof, that they were all trying to pressure her into giving up custody of me afterwards.)

I first overheard the sanitized version when I was about 4, and being the little mental magpie that I was, I just stored it away. I asked questions over the years, of all four, both separately and together. None of them are reliable narrators, but two of them keep diaries, and I managed to recreate enough of the story to figure out the approximate date and location, and it happened in a small town. When I was an undergrad, I had a summer project on memory the same summer I was supposed to be back east, so I decided to get the details and turn it into a case study. My rescue made it into the newspaper as a local happening, and the newspaper has a very good morgue. Which meant I found the person who broke the window, and got her memory, too, then built the composite story, which is what I posted (most of the denial, self-justification and self-righteousness is removed.) Per my mother, it was only for a quarter hour; per my other relatives, it was all day. My best guess is I spent 4-5 hours in the car and an hour and a half in the student union.

One of mother's issues/coping methods is that she will always tap her car keys on the roof of the car four times when she gets out and closes the door, and was a very, very early adopter of key-fob locks. I figured out the taps when I was about 7 and they bought a Vanagon. She stopped tapping four times and started tapping six times. Each tap is the way she checks seats. She destroys paint jobs on her cars, but she's never locked anyone or her keys in the car ever since, so it's a bit of compulsive behavior with function.

[marlakay]

9. Sounds like she learned her lesson

And lucky you weren't hurt.

I haven't forgotten kids but i have left a purse once in shopping cart and by miracle it was still there when i went back to Safeway.

I also have been forgotten once, i was put in hall for talking in 4th grade and teacher forgot i was there, school ended and i was a shy scared kid. She finally came out saw me and was very guilty apologized for leaving me there.

Since I was older it just made me feel like no one noticed me.

[DawgHouse]

7. Opening a car door seems pretty difficult for a 2 yr old. BUT...

this is a good time to remind people to keep their car doors locked for this very reason. Many years ago there was actually a campaign of sorts to remind people that neighborhood children may find your parked car an excellent place to hide. A child had gone missing and was sadly found in the car of the neighbor, parked in the carport. The child had gotten into the car, locked the doors, and couldn't get the door unlocked to get back out.

It stuck in my head so strongly that to this day, I always lock my doors when parked in my own driveway.