Death in a Hot Car

On summer's heat, the distracted brain and the intersection of left and right.

We couldn’t find our pitbull.

Baby is our daughter Edie’s pitbull. She found her at the Animal Foundation years before. Edie fell in love with her dopey, sweet face after seeing her in a local “adopt me” campaign. She begged us to go there and get her. We did.

I was worried about having a pitbull of unknown orgin around Desi who was a toddler then. She was inclined to lovingly pull fistfuls of fur or feathers out of every animal she saw. I worried Baby wouldn’t be the right addition to the family. This was my first “big dog.” Before this I had only had pugs and flat faced breeds, essentially pillows with legs, dogs that snored and snuffled and didn’t need walks, rarely barked or cared that anyone might be ringing the doorbell. These dogs are not challenging by nature. They simply needed to loaf on the couch and get their bellies scratched as much as possible.

But Edie adored Baby. And she had been right along - Baby was perfect for us. Sweet and gentle with the kids, but also the perfect nanny dog, protective, doting, able to handle all kinds of kid wrestling and shenanigans.

Baby was instant family.

Baby.

But now she was missing. Most of the day. This was unlike her. She never liked being away from the house or the kids. Her job was to supervise and love us. She wouldn’t even go for walks with other people.

That morning, David, Desi (then 7) and I took all the dogs to the dog park in the morning. Lucy had adopted a Rotweiler/Australian Shepard mix she named George. He was not settling into family life as easily as she had hoped. George came from the Animal Foundation too. His history was murky and unknown. He was a hot mess.

George was a dark, shaggy, handsome handful. But all over the place, confused, spastic, jumping on people, barking at anything that moved. He chased the cats and the chickens. Where Baby nuzzled the bunnies and Smudge ignored them completely, George barked and growled. His very presence was bedlam. Our once methodically-run kid chaos now became out and out animal pandemonium. We had to gate certain areas to protect the other animals who were terrified of George. And when people came to the house, George had to be removed and sequestered in Lucy’s casita in the backyard.

George.

We got George a high-priced trainer. David quickly learned how to be George’s boss and provide structure for him. We all took turns learning commands and working with him. He was smart and eager to please us. He calmed down, and more importantly we learned how to keep him in line. He is still a handful, but a more subdued, sweet, obedient handful than before.

But on the day when we couldn’t find Baby, it was early days with George and he was still a lot to handle. The dog park was a necessity to help calm him down. To exhaust him. We ran them around until the dogs were spent. We brought them home. We piled out of the car. We went on with our day.

Baby wasn’t around, but this wasn’t unusual. Sometimes she went to the neighbor’s house next door. The fence separating the properties had a hole in it and all the dogs - ours and the neighbors - went back and forth to and from the houses. Baby was there, we thought.

Baby was not there.

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Every year, on my social media, I post this article: Distracted: Forgetting a Child in the Backseat of a Car is a Horryfying Mistake. But is it a Crime? It is one of the best pieces of journalism I’ve read. Eloquent, deep and essential. I re-read it every year right before summer, when desert temps start hitting triple digits.

The piece was written by Gene Weingarten in 2009 and has become even more lucid and foundational in helping us understand how kids get left in hot cars and how we react to their deaths. Is it a criminal act or a punishable accident? An awful, life-demolishing mistake that alters families and senses of selves forever or the product of the ultimate parental neglect? The article won Weingarten a Pulitzer for taking these stories apart and constructing a real critique about our very human need to punish and villify, and to render ourselves separate from the horrors of life.

“It couldn’t have happened to me,” said the man who would bring an involuntary manslaughter charge to another man who just lost his child in a hot car accident. “I am a watchful father.”

People in the comments almost always asserted the same: “I could never do this. It would never happen to me.”

But Weingarten won’t let anyone off the hook. He answers the question: who could leave their child to die in a hot car?

The wealthy do, it turns out. And the poor, and the middle class. Parents of all ages and ethnicities do it. Mothers are just as likely to do it as fathers. It happens to the chronically absent-minded and to the fanatically organized, to the college-educated and to the marginally literate. In the last 10 years, it has happened to a dentist. A postal clerk. A social worker. A police officer. An accountant. A soldier. A paralegal. An electrician. A Protestant clergyman. A rabbinical student. A nurse. A construction worker. An assistant principal. It happened to a mental health counselor, a college professor and a pizza chef. It happened to a pediatrician. It happened to a rocket scientist.

The essay also delves into punishments and consequences, the idea that sometimes this occurence is viewed as a tragic accident and sometimes, as a nefarious criminal act of negligence and abuse. And that how that is decided is based on where you live and how you are viewed by the public and who is making the decisions and what their lived experience is. Essentially, whether leaving a baby in a hot car is an accident or a crime is in the eye of the beholder.

From Weingarten’s piece:

…just five days before Miles Harrison forgot his toddler son in the parking lot of the Herndon corporate-relocation business where he worked, a similar event had occurred a few hundred miles southeast. After a long shift at work, a Portsmouth, Va., sanitation department electrician named Andrew Culpepper picked up his toddler son from his parents, drove home, went into the house and then fell asleep, forgetting he’d had the boy in the car, leaving him to bake to death outside his home.

Harrison was charged with a crime. Culpepper was not. In each case, the decision fell to one person.

The man who decided the Culpepper case had lost a child to cancer. He felt he was following the law, but also added: “I also have some idea what it feels like, what it does to you, when you lose a child.”

The reason for how this can happen - loving doting parents forgetting their child in a car for hours - is the life’s work of a professor of psychology, molecular pharmacology and physiology at the University of South Florida, Dr. David Diamond.

It happens often enough that it now has a name: Fatal Distraction Syndrome.

It is esentially a failure of memory. The culprit is a change in routine. Dr. Diamond explains that we have two memory systems at play here. One is prospective memory, which is planing and executing an idea, like taking a child to daycare. The second is habit memory, which is the stuff we do so much, we don’t need to think about it to do it, like our morning commute.

“Prospective memory is processed by two brain structures, the hippocampus which stores all new information, and the prefrontal cortex, which is essential to making plans for the future,” Diamond writes, “The hippocampus provides access to one’s awareness that a child is in the car. The prefrontal cortex enables a parent to plan a route, including the plan to bring their child to the daycare, rather than to drive straight to work.”

Habit memory happens in a different part of the brain - the basal ganglia. It allows people to perform repetitive tasks without focusing on them, like remembering how to ride a bike. When we are engaged in doing something we’ve done many times before, like driving straight to work, our habit memory can override our alternative plans. And this happens to us over and over as we move through our day. That time you forgot to stop and get toilet paper on the way home from work is your habit memory overriding your prospective memory.

Leaving a child in a car is not the only devastating thing that can happen when our autopilot memory takes over. Take for example the a police officer at the Capitol n DC who left his service weapon in a bathroom in 2019. After investigating, it became clear this wasn’t a one-off. In 2015, a security person with Mitch McConnell’s office left their glock and magazine stuffed in the toilet seat cover holder of a Capitol visitor center bathroom stall. John Boehner’s security detail left a loaded firearm in the bathroom. An 8-year-old child visiting the Capitol with his parents found the weapon. And that same year, a custodian found a glock in a bathroom that was later traced back to security.

So, it happens. A lot. To all of us.

This memory lapse can also be exacerabated by exhaustion and stress. When the body is stressed, people’s brains slip into what they know and do all the time. Stress impacts what happens in the prefrontal cortex, and can stall essential skills, like planning and judgment. That means when faced with turning left to go to work as usual, or turning right to take the baby into daycare - while your body is flooded with thoughts of work, that phone call you don’t want to make, the meeting where things could get ugly, the fish milkshake of an email waiting for you in your inbox - the body does what it does all the time and turns left, keeps you on the path it knows.

It is at this moment, this intersection of left and right, in those particular circumstances, that parents can do the unthinkable - forget their beloved, doted-on child in the backseat.

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Late afternoon, I went out the front path of our house, out into the street. The strap on my shoe slid a bit down on my heel. I steadied myself against my car and adjusted it. Then I slid into my friend’s vehicle and we left.

We had a lovely time and I came home.

Baby’s dinner was uneaten in the bowl. I called the neighbor. She hadn’t been there. This was odd. It seemed implausible that she had run away, she was like velcro. Edie and I grew more nervous and confused.

Baby + Desi.

That evening, Edie and I walked the neighborhood and searched for her. We made calls. We worried. We decided to put up fliers. And I wrote a draft for a FB post about our lost dog. We searched the house, the yard. Maybe she was sick somewhere in the yard, or trapped inside a shed? Could someone have taken her? Lured her with a juicy steak or let’s be honest, with Baby, hamburger might’ve done it? Maybe someone in the neighborhood found her and is keeping her safe for us and just hasn’t contacted us yet or posted in the neighborhood FB group?

We went through all the scenarios.

Except one.

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“A universal observation I have made,” Dr. Diamond writes, “is that each parent’s brain appears to have created the false memory that he or she had brought the child to daycare.”

This false memory is the way that people can leave the child and never even consider they had left them behind. They work or hang out in their house, sleep. They talk about their child. It doesn’t even occur to them the child is in the car or that they didn’t get to the daycare. Their brain never cycles back through the morning and how everything went down. Of course they brought the baby in. They don’t give it a second throught.

I read accounts where people left their child in the car and even went down to the vehicle during the day to grab something they had forgotten and not made the connection the baby was in the car. Even then, at the car, inches from their lifeless child, their brain wouldn’t allow them to access that they didn’t actually make it to daycare.

This happens almost across the board in these cases.

______________

I woke up that morning. I thought about Baby. Then, I thought about the car.

It struck me for the first time: Could she have not gotten out with the other dogs?

No, impossible. I pushed it away.

Baby + Smudge.

I had Smudge in the front seat and David was wrangling George, who was still learning how to be on a leash, how to respond to commands, and even who we were in his life. Certainly, when Desi opened the back door, Baby climbed out too.

I put clothes on and grabbed the keys. David asked where I was going. But I didn’t want to say. Part of me clung to the impossibility that Baby had been left behind. We wouldn’t do that. We are functional people. Able to handle life and challenges. I was just going out there to check it off the list.

But there was also this sinking realization that flooded me on the walk out to the car, along the same path I took the night before on the way to the event with my friend. I had walked right by the car. Touched it with the palm of my hand. Adjusted my strap.

And kept on walking by.

_________________

There are hard things in life, but waking your daughter to tell her that you killed her beloved best friend is something I never want to do again.

David and I laid in Edie’s bed with her and cried over the uselessness of it all. The loss of our sweet girl. There weren’t words. Lucy was angry with us for awhile. Like me, she goes to anger to protect herself from saddness. But Edie never blamed us, even when she could’ve and had reason to. She never blamed her sister for adopting this wildcard dog who took so much of our energy and focus. I suspect she also blamed herself, because we always find a way to blame ourselves. It’s human to do so.

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For the year or so since this happened, I have not been able to make peace with the idea that Baby watched us walk away from the car. And left her behind. That she knew we had abandoned her. (Or am I projecting my issues onto my dog? Does it even matter?) The brain makes up all the scenarios.

Raffi + Baby.

Even collecting the photos for this piece left me weighted down, running through the scenarios we should’ve taken, right back at the car, opening the trunk and finding her lifeless, curled up body there. The paw I saw sticking out before I saw the rest of her. That slow overcoming sensation that drowns you, the understanding of what is truly happening, that renders all your strength and rightness and makes you weak and you need to sit down to bear it all. That’s the feeling.

But Baby was not someone’s baby. It is different when it is a child. The weight is so so exponentially more. It is no wonder that after finding his 18 month old son dead in the backseat, after he assumed he had dropped the boy at daycare, a dad in Virginia carried his child’s limp body into the house, carefully laid him down, got his gun, walked into the woods on his property and shot himself.

How does anyone ever recover from this? How do you put one foot in front of the other? And again? And again? How do you find the way to live with yourself?

For the parents who have lost a child this way, who made the left turn and not the right, who will have to bear the sensation that drowns them, every day, for the rest of their lives, this mistake is life-ending and unrecoverable. There is no jail sentence that could be worse than living through the realities of what you did and didn’t do, and how that one absent-minded moment destroyed everything you worked for, hoped for, and held dear.

Living through it is the life sentence.

And it could happen to any of us, no matter how sure we are that it wouldn’t.

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END NOTES:

After I wrote this essay, I realized we needed ice. Our fridge’s ice maker wasn’t putting out enough to keep the people in this house happy.

So I announced I was going to 7-11. Then, Desi wanted to go. She wanted a snack. I said yes. In the store, there was a flurry of snack-picking and then a realization that Raffi would be pissed if Desi got a snack and he didn’t, so there was more snack picking. And then I figured Lucy might want a Diet Coke. Do I want a Diet Coke?More thoughts. And when I got home, I went to put the ice away and realized I never bought it.

This is the exact same memory override process that happens when someone leaves a child in a car, except, this time - Thank God - no one was in peril. Life wasn’t altered too much. I got back in the car and made another trip for ice.

I wonder how often this happens to us all the time and it is barely more than an inconvenience?

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Also….

A couple weeks ago I wrote a story about a 13 year old boy in our neighborhood and how I was watching him (via his social media feed) going down a difficult and dark path.

This weekend, while we were at the beach in LA, a drive by shooter shot into the boy’s house, killing his dog. Police canvassed the neighborhood, waking up neighbors all along the street in the wee hours of the morning. I awoke to texts from panicked neighbors Sunday morning. They were afraid the shooting was random. A bad omen for crime in the neighborhood.

But the shooting wasn’t random. The shooters were gunning for Coolio. Coolio can’t leave his house, he is under house arrest. Fish in a barrel, as they say. In response, he taunted this shooters on his IG feed, and then changed his handle again. The police set up a surveillance system at the end of our street.

The story of this boy’s life continues….

Thank you, as always, for reading. xo Kim