ARCADE, N.Y. – A 5-month-old baby died after his mother forgot to drop him off at day care and left him in her hot car all day while she worked.
Lynn Brol, 32, of Franklinville arrived at her job around 8 a.m. Thursday and did not realize she had left her son, Brayden, in the car until she left work at 5 p.m., police in the rural Wyoming County village of Arcade said.
The child was already dead when the distraught mother called 911, Chief John Laird said. He said Brol usually dropped her son off at a day-care facility a quarter mile away from her office at a debt collection company.
No charges were immediately filed.
Thursday's temperatures climbed into the low 90s, with high humidity. The vehicle's inside air temperature likely exceeded 130 degrees, said Jan Null, an adjunct meteorology professor at San Francisco State University who researches vehicle temperatures and tracks instances of children left in hot vehicles.
Brayden was the 19th child to die in a hot car this summer in the U.S. and the first in New York state, Null said.
The number of such deaths has risen dramatically since the mid-1990s, totaling around 340 in the past 10 years. Experts said the increase coincides with the practice of putting children in the back seat, where they are more easily forgotten. That change was intended to protect kids after juvenile air-bag deaths peaked in 1995.
Children are particularly vulnerable because their immature respiratory and circulatory systems do not manage heat as efficiently as adults'.
Get all the stories you need-to-know from the most powerful name in news delivered first thing every morning to your inbox