Hot Cars Are Putting Parents on the Hot Seat

It was going to be a quick dash into the grocery store, and Subha Sadaf saw no need to wake her sleeping babies and haul them into the heat. So she parked her van in the shade of a tree, cracked a window open and hurried across the Northridge parking lot and into the market.

But a few minutes turned into 10, 15, maybe 20 minutes ... long enough for an off-duty cop who had seen Sadaf leave to summon backup and paramedics, and for a roving news cameraman to arrive on the scene. And by the time Sadaf returned with her groceries, police had begun a rescue operation, feeding sips of water through the window to her children, who were flushed and sweating from the heat.

The news camera rolled as Sadaf broke through the crowd, wild-eyed and frantic, to reach her van. And an angry officer screamed, admonishing her: He’d been about to break a window to save those kids. What kind of mother would leave them locked in a car?

That dramatic footage has been played again and again on TV in the six weeks since Sadaf’s arrest, turning the 21-year-old mother of two into an unwitting poster child for this summer’s tragic news trend: Children left by parents to perish in hot car. Film at 11.

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I suppose Sadaf should consider herself lucky. Forget the night she spent in jail or the child abuse charges she faces or the shame and anguish she feels each time her image shows up on TV. At least her children--two boys, ages 19 months and 2 months--are alive and well.

Not so five other children who have died in hot cars in California this summer. Every week, it seems, another story of a death or rescue surfaces.

Some are truly horrific, like the two Simi Valley brothers who died strapped in the family minivan in their driveway, while mom took a four-hour nap inside. But some reflect the kind of parental missteps that happen all the time, but only make news when we have our noses to the wind, sniffing for signs of tragedy.

Like the case of the grandmother jailed for leaving her 6-year-old grandson in a hot car because he refused to accompany her into Target in Gardena. Or the San Fernando Valley man reported to police for leaving his 8-month-old daughter sleeping in her car seat while he went into a video store to rent a movie. Wrong, dumb ... but criminal?

Maybe you’re one of those parents who has never left a child alone in a car while you’ve dashed in to pick up the dry cleaning, or forgotten a sleeping baby as you hustled her siblings inside the house or unloaded groceries. Perhaps you’ve never let the prospect of toting a fussy baby or balky toddler or strong-willed 6-year-old overrule your own good judgment and made a choice no “good” parent should make.

Then you are probably struggling to understand just how a parent could be so stupid or scatterbrained to go about her day and leave a child behind. “I am a working mother of two and try not to be that judgmental,” e-mailed one reader after the Simi Valley deaths. “But I just do not understand how you can ‘forget’ your kids in the car.”

Or maybe you read the news accounts and shudder at the choices those parents made, all the while recalling the risks that exhaustion and carelessness have pushed you to take.

Still, there is a difference between a devoted mother who inadvertently exposes her kids to danger when she loses track of time or misjudges the heat, and a woman who leaves her kids to die in a hot car while she takes a four-hour nap or carouses with friends.

Or is there?

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Every year, about 60 children across the United States die after being left in vehicles in the heat. This year, California has led the nation in cases, and social commentators have taken note. We are, they say, choosing our own convenience over our children’s safety when we haul them around on our errands, then leave them locked alone in cars.

I suspect it is more ignorance than selfishness. We spend so much time in our cars, our minivans, our SUVs that they have become extensions of our homes, a sort of rolling sanctuary. We take pains to buckle our children into safety seats, and presume that swathes them in security.

But the temperature inside a closed car can rise to 125 degrees after just 20 minutes parked in the sun on a day when the temperature outside is 90 degrees. Leaving a window cracked open does virtually nothing to reduce the buildup of heat, researchers say. And children exposed, even briefly, to extreme heat can suffer seizures, brain damage or death.

Several states have countered the rising tide of cases with public education campaigns on the perils of heat. Others have passed new laws that toughen punishment for parents. Here, legislators are considering a bill that would allow police to issue a $100 ticket to anyone who leaves a child under 6 years old alone in a car for more than one minute.

The intent, says Assemblywoman Jackie Speier, sponsor of the measure, is not to punish parents but to give police a tool to help raise public awareness about the dangers of leaving kids alone. Currently, police have only two choices--to arrest on a serious charge, like child abuse or endangerment, or to look the other way.

It is a sobering commentary on our times that we need a law to remind us not to leave our kids behind in the heat.

But even good parents make mistakes. And a $100 fine would seem a small price to pay for a lesson like the one Subha Sadaf learned, when her decision to leave her children alone landed her in a spotlight as unforgiving and blistering as the heat her children faced that day.

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Sandy Banks’ column is published on Sundays and Tuesdays. She can be reached online at sandy.banks@latimes.com