Breaking into a car to save a child.

[Trekker4747]

LINK

There was an incident this past weekend where a group of people broke into a car to save the life of a toddler inside the sealed car. Upon arriving, the owners of the car -the child's aunt/uncle- seemed more concerned if insurance would pay for the damaged window, apparently showing no concern for the child whose life was in danger. (It was very, very hot and humid here this past weekend.)

Local radio station program was talking about this yesterday afternoon and wondered what it would take to get people to stop endangering their child's lives by leaving them in a car in extreme temperatures like we, and most places, have over the summer. Experts say temperatures inside of a car even in indirect sunlight can soar in a matter of minutes, reaching temperatures to over 120-degrees even if it's "only" in the 80s outside.

Incidents like this happen all of the time and it really is a question of why it happens so much and what it'd take to stop it. And why *does* it happen? Why *do* people "forget" that they have their child with them (as happens often) or think it's okay to leave the child in the car "just for a minute." (In this case the guardians were apparently show shopping or something in the strip-mall so they intended to be away for the car for longer than a few minutes.

I've also myself always wondered what the personal legal ramifications could be for breaking into a car to save the life of a child. Is there a threshold where it becomes okay to break into the car and not illegal? I myself would break into a car to save a kid while simultaneously be on the phone to 911, but I really do wonder what would happen in the aftermath.

I can only assume I would be protected by some "good Samaritan"-like law where my actions aren't criminal or open me up for civil litigation considering my actions were taken in order to save a life, or try and to save a life. Like if one performs CPR on someone and is unsuccessful or in moving the body to a CPR position they cause damage.

Anyway, it's pretty damn angering how much this happens.

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

i'd say the resuer is in the clear and the insurance rejects coverage for gross negligence on the parent's part?

 

[RoJoHen]

It's infuriating how often this kind of story ends up in the news, both with kids and pets being left inside cars.

Even if it were a beautiful spring day with a nice breeze and you left your windows cracked, I can't think of any justifiable reason to leave your child alone in a car while you go off doing whatever.

 

[Kilana2]

They tested pedestrians on German TV:

They put a crying babydoll into a car (standing in the glaring sun) and later an artificial dog that issued a barking. People passed the car without looking back when the `doll´cried, but they called the police when the poor `dog´was in danger.

I'm at a loss at that.....

 

[Kestra]

State laws differ on this, but it is always reasonable to call 911 and inform them of the situation and what you are about to do. If you aren't sure about the laws for your area regarding kids and pets in cars, it's worth looking up, especially if you live in a place where temperatures can become dangerous inside a car.

 

[Trekker4747]

Video of an experiment done on adults, offering them $100 if they can sit in a car in the heat for 10 minutes.

[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnU9uvRe4GA#t=78[/yt]

 

[Locutus of Bored]

Incidents like this happen all of the time and it really is a question of why it happens so much and what it'd take to stop it. And why *does* it happen? Why *do* people "forget" that they have their child with them (as happens often) or think it's okay to leave the child in the car "just for a minute." (In this case the guardians were apparently show shopping or something in the strip-mall so they intended to be away for the car for longer than a few minutes.

Believe it or not, the chief cause for the rise in incidents of child hyperthermia in cars is the proliferation of passenger side airbags in cars in the early 90s. It was found that in a limited number of cases rapidly inflating passenger side airbags could kill or seriously injure a child, especially if they were in a rear-facing child safety seat. So laws were passed to move children into the backseat, and the child left in a car hyperthermia phenomenon jumped from about 11 children total in the three year period from 1990-92 to about 36/37 children per year on average now (often with a wild variance by year), drastically higher than were ever lost due to passenger seat airbags killing children.

This is not necessarily advocacy for putting children back in the front seat or removing passenger side airbags, it's just an acknowledgement of the correlation between laws passed with good intention to protect child safety and the unintended consequences they had.

People tend to want to place blame for these incidents and assume that they all involve bad or negligent parents, when the truth of the matter is, "out of sight, out of mind" is sadly a very true idiom. A combination of stress, lack of sleep, rushing to work and school and daycare in the morning, and the child simply not making any noise in the backseat can easily lead one to think you've already dropped the baby off at daycare before you park and head off to work with the child still in the backseat. It happens to rich and poor, white and minority, men and women, hovering helicopter parent and free range parent alike. It happens with overworked caretakers a lot (in about 37% of cases), but also with normally relaxed parents just having a stressful or busy day (about 20% of cases).

This is not to say that there aren't parents with a history of negligent behavior or substance abuse who have a much higher chance of doing this, or lots of cases where people do it intentionally thinking it's OK to run inside the store for a few minutes while the child waits in the car, but the majority of cases are not caused by bad parents who deserve to go to prison and have their families ruined and their other children taken away from them. They're just normal people who had a stress or lack of sleep induced memory lapse, unfortunately in a way they cost a child their life. Obviously, as in the case in the OP where the person seems more concerned about the insurance costs of the broken window than the fact that their child could have died, that should be cause for follow-up and greater concern.

Here's a really long but worthwhile Pulitzer Prize winning article from the Washington Post that interview families who have lost children due to hyperthermia from leaving them in cars, and how it has affected their lives and the legal ramifications they suffered:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifes...e0fe3a-f580-11e3-a3a5-42be35962a52_story.html

Here's some fact sheets on child hyperthermia in cars:

http://www.ggweather.com/heat/master.htm

http://noheatstroke.org/

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Thanks for linking the WaPo piece, Locutus. I read it back when it first came out and it was a real eye-opener. I am sympathetic to people whose children have died or been hurt by such tragic mistakes.

(No sympathy at all for parents who purposely leave their kids locked in a hot car, though. Fuck them.)

Anyway, yeah, it shouldn't be a crime to smash someone's windows to let a kid/pet out. Although it is probably a better policy to call 911 and let the police or fire department do it. They should have safer tools, such as the hammers designed specifically to break tempered glass (which everyone should have, really.)

 

[Tora Ziyal]

Locutus, good post. Like Robert Maxwell, I read the WaPost piece when it was published and it gave me a new perspective.

Personally, I would call 911. If they couldn't have someone there in a couple minutes, yes, I'd try to break in myself.

 

[Karzak]

That Washington Post article is heartbreaking.

 

[Kirby]

I would smash a window to get a kid or an animal out of a hot car, and would gladly face any charges brought against me as a result.
Those people that intentionally do that piss me off to no end, and everyone should know better.
Right when my son was born, there were a couple of national stories where a parent accidentally left their kid in the car when they went to work. If they truly did forget, then I feel absolutely horrible for those people, and would hope that some thoughtful passerby would do the right thing. One of my greatest fears what that I would do that; It's an awful feeling.

 

[Trekker4747]

Thanks for linking the WaPo piece, Locutus. I read it back when it first came out and it was a real eye-opener. I am sympathetic to people whose children have died or been hurt by such tragic mistakes.

(No sympathy at all for parents who purposely leave their kids locked in a hot car, though. Fuck them.)

Anyway, yeah, it shouldn't be a crime to smash someone's windows to let a kid/pet out. Although it is probably a better policy to call 911 and let the police or fire department do it. They should have safer tools, such as the hammers designed specifically to break tempered glass (which everyone should have, really.)

I actually have a glass-breaking tool in my car. And while I'd agree with calling 911, I don't think I agree with waiting for them to get there in order to breach the car. I mean in the case of a child drenched in sweat, baking, in a 120-degree car on a hot summer afternoon, minutes can matter and at the very least you're looking at a child (or pet) that's suffering in an environment it cannot easily breathe in.

Call 911, absolutely, but I'd inform them I'm breaking into the car in order to remove the suffering living being. You're not likely to get any criminal charges forced upon you and any civil suit isn't going to go anywhere simply because no judge is going to make you pay for a window when you likely saved a life.

And I, for one, don't accept the excuse of keeping children in the backseat as an excuse for this problem. There may be the correlation and that very well may be the reason, but I don't accept it as an excuse.

When you're responsible for another life it should be on the front of your mind at all times and I just do not see how it'd be possible to "forget" you have a child in the backseat of your car and to not constantly be checking in the back or doing something, anything, to ensure you know this.

I cannot speak from personal experience, not having children, I but I do not see how one could so easily "forget" they have a child in the backseat of the car. I get people get locked into a routine and such but when you're entrusted with the care of a child I would think you'd make it some priority. "I have to take the child to daycare before going to work."

But, sometimes, yeah, shit does happen.

In the case of this story in the OP, however, it doesn't seem those in care of the child (an aunt and uncle) left the kid behind due to forgetting it but out of just leaving behind while they did their shopping.

Local and federal authorities arrested the couple today on local and federal charges, including aggravated child endangerment.


LINK

It's good to see some serious charges here, but I wonder how well they'll stick. It seems the "aggravated" part of the charges suggests something that did not happen which could make the defense's job fairly easy. Depending on, I suppose, the legal definition of "aggravated" in these circumstances and relevant venue.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

Yeah, I'd have no problem breaking a window to rescue a child. I think the law covers these situations already through what's called a "necessity defense." Essentially, it's a choice of evils defense where one evil is relatively minor (destruction of property) while the other evil is extreme (death of a child). A more common example is something like trespassing onto someone's property to seek shelter from a tornado or hurricane. Alternatively, just straight up "defense of others" would be the way to present the defense (which would be reasonable if using force against a person, I don't know why it would be unreasonable against property).

 

[Trekker4747]

Most of what I've seen has been along those lines. Another being that while breaking into a car is illegal part of it being illegal is intent. And if your intent is to rescue a child, or animal, from a hot car and not to steal, or steal from, the car no crime is committed because no crime was intended. Usually meaning that any criminal charges are not likely to happen or see prosecution.

And while a civil case is possible it's unlikely to make it far either as the courts will see what was done as part of a "necessary evil", the damage occurred with a greater purpose behind it -to save a life.

 

[Locutus of Bored]

And I, for one, don't accept the excuse of keeping children in the backseat as an excuse for this problem. There may be the correlation and that very well may be the reason, but I don't accept it as an excuse.

So, what's your explanation? That parents suddenly just became more negligent around 1993 for shits and giggles? Did everyone have Jurassic Park on the brain and started forgetting about their kids?

There's a clear and well-documented correlation between the widespread installation of passenger side airbags in cars, cases of children sitting in the front seat being hurt or killed by the airbags, well-intentioned laws resulting in moving children and child safety seats into the backseat, and a subsequent rise in children being left in locked cars and dying from hyperthermia. Your failure to conceive of there being a relation is irrelevant.

And it's easy to say there's no excuse, but if there was no provable intent to cause harm or history of negligence or abuse or specific negligence related to the case, what would you do? Lock them up on general principle and destroy the rest of their family? Do you think a parent who's memory lapse resulted in their child's death is going to suffer more than that by being thrown in prison as some kind vengeance? Did you read the WaPo article where the parent tried to kill themselves with the cop's gun upon realizing the gravity of what they'd done? What Hell could be worse for them than the knowledge that they lost track of their child and the baby died horribly as a result?

When you're responsible for another life it should be on the front of your mind at all times and I just do not see how it'd be possible to "forget" you have a child in the backseat of your car and to not constantly be checking in the back or doing something, anything, to ensure you know this.

Did you read the damn article? It went into this extensively:

David Diamond is picking at his breakfast at a Washington hotel, trying to explain.

“Memory is a machine,” he says, “and it is not flawless. Our conscious mind prioritizes things by importance, but on a cellular level, our memory does not. If you’re capable of forgetting your cellphone, you are potentially capable of forgetting your child.”

Diamond is a professor of molecular physiology at the University of South Florida and a consultant to the veterans hospital in Tampa. He’s here for a national science conference to give a speech about his research, which involves the intersection of emotion, stress and memory. What he’s found is that under some circumstances, the most sophisticated part of our thought-processing center can be held hostage to a competing memory system, a primitive portion of the brain that is -- by a design as old as the dinosaur’s -- inattentive, pigheaded, nonanalytical, stupid.

Diamond is the memory expert with a lousy memory, the one who recently realized, while driving to the mall, that his infant granddaughter was asleep in the back of the car. He remembered only because his wife, sitting beside him, mentioned the baby. He understands what could have happened had he been alone with the child. Almost worse, he understands exactly why.

The human brain, he says, is a magnificent but jury-rigged device in which newer and more sophisticated structures sit atop a junk heap of prototype brains still used by lower species. At the top of the device are the smartest and most nimble parts: the prefrontal cortex, which thinks and analyzes, and the hippocampus, which makes and holds on to our immediate memories. At the bottom is the basal ganglia, nearly identical to the brains of lizards, controlling voluntary but barely conscious actions.

Diamond says that in situations involving familiar, routine motor skills, the human animal presses the basal ganglia into service as a sort of auxiliary autopilot. When our prefrontal cortex and hippocampus are planning our day on the way to work, the ignorant but efficient basal ganglia is operating the car; that’s why you’ll sometimes find yourself having driven from point A to point B without a clear recollection of the route you took, the turns you made or the scenery you saw.

Ordinarily, says Diamond, this delegation of duty “works beautifully, like a symphony. But sometimes, it turns into the ‘1812 Overture.’ The cannons take over and overwhelm.”

By experimentally exposing rats to the presence of cats, and then recording electrochemical changes in the rodents’ brains, Diamond has found that stress -- either sudden or chronic -- can weaken the brain’s higher-functioning centers, making them more susceptible to bullying from the basal ganglia. He’s seen the same sort of thing play out in cases he’s followed involving infant deaths in cars.

“The quality of prior parental care seems to be irrelevant,” he said. “The important factors that keep showing up involve a combination of stress, emotion, lack of sleep and change in routine, where the basal ganglia is trying to do what it’s supposed to do, and the conscious mind is too weakened to resist. What happens is that the memory circuits in a vulnerable hippocampus literally get overwritten, like with a computer program. Unless the memory circuit is rebooted -- such as if the child cries, or, you know, if the wife mentions the child in the back -- it can entirely disappear.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifes...e0fe3a-f580-11e3-a3a5-42be35962a52_story.html

I cannot speak from personal experience...

But, sometimes, yeah, shit does happen.

But wait, I thought you just went through a whole spiel about how shit doesn't just happen?

Sorry for the snark, but this is literally how every discussion goes with you it seems. You have a preconceived notion and no matter what anyone posts contradicting that you stick with that for as long as possible, never posting anything in the way of evidence beyond your gut feeling that it just seems wrong. I knew the discussion was going to go this way as I was posting, which is why I went for the extra links as a quick reference for the evidence so you didn't have to wade through the whole WaPo article.

 

[Trekker4747]

How is it, then, countless millions of busy parents with front airbags manage to not kill their kids in the backseats of their cars in hot weather. The study may be a *reason* but I don't accept it as an excuse to "forgive" a parent who does this. I'm sure it's a traumatizing, dramatic, and gut-wrenching experience and I don't think any form of prosecution or legal attack is necessary but, at the end of the day, I feel the parent was an idiot.

Vastly more people manage to not kill their kids in hot cars, people who're just as busy, people who're just as pulled thin, people with rear-facing car seats in the back of the car. So apparently it isn't *that* hard to remember you have another young, vulnerable, human life in the backseat.

Hell, there's any number of reminder techniques one can employ (I saw it suggested somewhere placing a personal belonging that's needed at the destination in the back, putting a reminder in the front of the car somewhere -like a rattle on the dashboard or something- all the way to a suggestion of tying a string to the car-seat to the door handle that'd prevent you from exiting the car without unhooking it, and thus reminding you of what's on the other end of the string.

Then there's just, well, remembering. I was talking about this with my family and my sister-in-law said she made it a personal habit to always look in the backseat of the car before getting out, regardless of she had my niece with her at the time or not.

The airbag thing, human psychology and all of that may be the reason why this happens with no apparent bias to a certain group of people but, for me, that's not an excuse. You're responsible for a human life so one should be doing whatever it takes to make sure stuff like this doesn't happen and the overwhelming majority of people are able to pull it off.

In cases where people genuinely forget I feel for them. Mistakes happen and what they have to live with is more than enough punishment. I just don't fully accept "just forgetting," because I would think being in charge of another life one would keep that fact on the front of their mind at all times and would be diligent in not forgetting. We shouldn't shrug these cases off as someone "just forgetting" and find ways to prevent it from happening.

In the local case:

Arraignment is this afternoon, the care-takers are claiming they forgot about the child being in the back of the car as they were involved in discussion when exiting the car. So it seems, perhaps, this was a case of "forgetting" as well.

 

[ALF]

I can't understand how this hot car pets/kids dying is a new phenomenon. We've had cars with windows that roll up for what - nearly 100 years. Plus, we've always had hot days in summers. Why are these incidents spiking recently? Why are there no accounts of these things happening in the 50s, 60s, 70s, etc? I've seen charts on the stats but they don't start before 1990.

 

[Gov Kodos]

I can't understand how this hot car pets/kids dying is a new phenomenon. We've had cars with windows that roll up for what - nearly 100 years. Plus, we've always had hot days in summers. Why are these incidents spiking recently? Why are there no accounts of these things happening in the 50s, 60s, 70s, etc? I've seen charts on the stats but they don't start before 1990.

When I was a kid, windows rolled manually. Perhaps, power windows have been part of that spike?

 

[Karzak]

The airbag thing, human psychology and all of that may be the reason why this happens with no apparent bias to a certain group of people but, for me, that's not an excuse. You're responsible for a human life so one should be doing whatever it takes to make sure stuff like this doesn't happen and the overwhelming majority of people are able to pull it off.

Being that you are, by your own admission, not a parent (yet?) perhaps it would be unwise to throw around general statements like this, telling others who live the life that comes with being a parent how they should behave and what they should be doing.

You have no personal experience in the matter in question (being a parent), so all you have to offer is theoretical supposition and the general impression I am getting is that your theoretical supposition is pretty useless in this matter, and borders on offensive.

In cases where people genuinely forget I feel for them. Mistakes happen and what they have to live with is more than enough punishment. I just don't fully accept "just forgetting," because I would think being in charge of another life one would keep that fact on the front of their mind at all times and would be diligent in not forgetting. We shouldn't shrug these cases off as someone "just forgetting" and find ways to prevent it from happening.

Now I am confused. You think that "forgetting" is a genuine mistake and people who fall prey to it should not be punished. Then in the next sentence you are saying that you don't accept "forgetting" and that we shouldn't "shrug these cases off." Which is it?

 

[Robert Maxwell]

How is it, then, countless millions of busy parents with front airbags manage to not kill their kids in the backseats of their cars in hot weather. The study may be a *reason* but I don't accept it as an excuse to "forgive" a parent who does this. I'm sure it's a traumatizing, dramatic, and gut-wrenching experience and I don't think any form of prosecution or legal attack is necessary but, at the end of the day, I feel the parent was an idiot.

Vastly more people manage to not kill their kids in hot cars, people who're just as busy, people who're just as pulled thin, people with rear-facing car seats in the back of the car. So apparently it isn't *that* hard to remember you have another young, vulnerable, human life in the backseat.

Hell, there's any number of reminder techniques one can employ (I saw it suggested somewhere placing a personal belonging that's needed at the destination in the back, putting a reminder in the front of the car somewhere -like a rattle on the dashboard or something- all the way to a suggestion of tying a string to the car-seat to the door handle that'd prevent you from exiting the car without unhooking it, and thus reminding you of what's on the other end of the string.

Then there's just, well, remembering. I was talking about this with my family and my sister-in-law said she made it a personal habit to always look in the backseat of the car before getting out, regardless of she had my niece with her at the time or not.

The airbag thing, human psychology and all of that may be the reason why this happens with no apparent bias to a certain group of people but, for me, that's not an excuse. You're responsible for a human life so one should be doing whatever it takes to make sure stuff like this doesn't happen and the overwhelming majority of people are able to pull it off.

In cases where people genuinely forget I feel for them. Mistakes happen and what they have to live with is more than enough punishment. I just don't fully accept "just forgetting," because I would think being in charge of another life one would keep that fact on the front of their mind at all times and would be diligent in not forgetting. We shouldn't shrug these cases off as someone "just forgetting" and find ways to prevent it from happening.

In the local case:

Arraignment is this afternoon, the care-takers are claiming they forgot about the child being in the back of the car as they were involved in discussion when exiting the car. So it seems, perhaps, this was a case of "forgetting" as well.

I guess you always make perfect decisions, then? You never make mistakes, never do things you aren't supposed to? You've never been neglectful or absent-minded in your life?

I seem to recall you driving when under specific doctor's orders not to--putting everyone on the road at risk because you had to have (of all things) fajita shells.

There's also the thread where you talking about making a blatantly illegal turn and got angry when your attempts to justify it fell on deaf ears.

Now, I guess, if a grieving friend came to you because they accidentally forgot their kid in the back seat who subsequently baked to death in the summer heat, I guess you'll gladly pass judgment on them as an idiot and a terrible parent, right before you go commit some more traffic violations (and then come here hoping people will support your reckless decisions.)