It's hard for me to imagine a more searing torture to a parent's soul than forgetting their toddler in the back seat of the family car on a scalding hot day to discover they'd succumbed to the heat.
Not only would the remorse be beyond anything I can visualize, but in many such cases, they then must answer to the criminal justice system for their negligence, as if such devastating loss wasn't locking them away in the dungeon of their hearts and minds until their final breath.
Yet this happens over and over, as evidenced just the other day in Fort Smith where a 3-year-old was discovered in a car on a day where the temperature reportedly reached 100 degrees.
Apparently, a good Samaritan saw the child and broke out a window. The toddler was pronounced dead at a local hospital.
News reports said it was the third such child death in our state since 2020, and the 17th this year in the U.S. As I write, police are continuing to investigate.
These terrible and preventable incidents continue to occur to ordinarily responsible parents nationwide, despite similar stories each year warning of such needless disasters.
We humans tend to be forgetful creatures just as a matter of, well, being fallible animals. But these incidents take mental lapses to their highest level.
I've read numerous stories about reminders to stem this tide, such as keeping a small baby toy in sight of the driver as a reminder of a back-seat passenger.
In 2021 we purchased a car that alerts the driver to check the rear seat. I suspect other late-model vehicles do likewise. If not, they certainly should by now.
Other suggestions are for a female driver to purposefully leave her purse in the rear seat with a child, or for a man to leave his wallet beside the child.
Good grief, if nothing else, never assume you won't forget and tape a reminder note to the steering wheel about the baby.
The majority of hot-car deaths--53 percent--reportedly happen because some adult forgets a child in a car, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. You can rightfully ask yourself: How does this happen after so much national publicity of the matter?
Families read of this horror but then invariably blow it off as another one of those incidents "that could never happen to me." Not long before it does certainly happen to them.
Both 2018 and 2019 saw the highest number of such deaths, 53 both years, because children were forgotten, according to Jan Null, a certified consulting meteorologist with the Department of Meteorology and Climate Science at San Jose State University who has been tracking vehicular heatstroke deaths since 1998.
Among the trends he discovered: About 46 percent of the time when a child was forgotten, the caregiver intended to drop the child off at a day care or preschool; Thursdays and Fridays have had the highest number of such deaths. More than half of the deaths (54 percent) are children less than 2 years old.
So do such critical messages ultimately reach those who either don't get it, or fail to use such techniques, especially on days when outside temperatures reach 70 degrees and above, but can soar inside a shut car to as high as 115?
Null's tracking of heatstroke deaths of children in vehicles showed 23 occurred in 2021 and 17 thus far in 2022. From 1998-2020, the average number of children under the age of 15 that died each year from heatstroke was 38.
Nearly every state has experienced at least one hot-car death since 1998.
Not only should parents set reminders for themselves when out driving with a child in the car, it's critical that parents with children old enough to wander to the family car and climb inside on their own always keep their car locked when parked at home. Those kinds of heat-related deaths also are reported nationally, though not nearly as frequently.
This column today may not reach all that many parents and caregivers who bear the crushing burden of protecting a child's life. I understand that. But it does give me the chance to voice the distress I feel whenever I picture a lifeless child limp and baked inside a car where he or she never should have been.
And if it does cause at least one of the adults responsible for their care and protection to take relatively simple measures to make sure this nightmare never becomes a reality for them, I'll feel like my time at the laptop was worthwhile today.
By the way, the very same cautions apply to the pets we too callously leave behind to die in over-heated cars.
Mike Masterson is a longtime Arkansas journalist, was editor of three Arkansas dailies and headed the master's journalism program at Ohio State University. Email him at mmasterson@arkansasonline.com.