Since the beginning of 2014, there have already been an estimated number of 16 children who have died from heat strokes, because of being left in hot vehicles by their parents and or caregivers. The children are strapped in their car seats or locked in their cars, with no ways of escaping with the temperature rising by the minute.

On a website dedicated to keep awareness of children being left in cars, it is said that there are a couple of reasons of why a child would be trapped in a hot car. The reasons are: with about 59%, a parent or guardian forgot about the child; with about 29%, a child was playing in an unattended vehicle; with about 18% a child was purposely left in the car.

On an average summer day, with the temperature at 90 degrees Fahrenheit it takes around 10 minutes for the car to reach around 110 degrees Fahrenheit. This means the temperature rises 1 degree every minute, so in the first 30 minutes of leaving a child locked in a car on a typical summer day the temperature has risen to 124 degrees Fahrenheit.

Leaving a child in a car can be an honest mistake by parents or a way for parents not wanting their child anymore. This is an easy way to get rid of their child and say it was a mistake. This is a horrific way to kill a child with suffocation and heat stroke. There are simpler alternatives in not wanting your child anymore and that alternative would be foster care or adoption, instead of taking your innocent child’s life

In a recent story with a father leaving his own child in his car as he was at work, was an “accident”, resulting in his son dying. While he was at work, it was said that he wasn’t working, but rather talking to six other women on the internet, while his son was struggling for his life.

The boy, Cooper, was in the car for about 7 hours until his father came back and found him in the car unresponsive, with the temperature being 88 degrees.

By the time the father, Justin Ross Harris, had returned to his car, he supposedly drove a couple of miles before noticing his son in the back seat. Another contributing suspicion to Cooper’s death is the fact that both his parents had researched temperatures in which a child could die in a car, and a veterinarian video on dangers of leaving animals and humans in cars. Harris also searched websites on how to survive in prison and life without a child.
After all of the evidence and facts collected, it is blatantly obvious that the toddler’s father was planning on leaving his own son in the car to die, and it was not an honest mistake as some parents make. Either way the consequences resulting in Harris’s decisions should be rigorous, considering the fate at which his choices have cost him the life of his son and the possibility of prison time.