The Waco Police Department sent out a reminder to parents, and the community, after a 1-year-old child died from being left in a car for over nine hours.
The 1-year-old Houston girl who passed away last week marks the second child-vehicular heatstroke death in Texas this year, and the 20th in the United States.
According to the police department, Texas leads all states with 134 child-vehicular heatstroke deaths since 1998. In 2020, there were 25 child heatstroke deaths in the United States, five of which were in Texas.
"Here in Waco, our 911 dispatchers have received a few calls this year about kids being locked in cars but thankfully in these cases the parents were always there and it was an accidental lock of the car door to where the parent could not get in, so they called 911 for assistance," said the police department.
53 percent of children who are left in a vehicle were forgotten by a caregiver, and 25.2 percent of these instances a child entered an unattended vehicle unnoticed, according to the Texas Heatstroke Task Force.
Anyone who finds a child left alone in a vehicle is asked to call 911 immediately.
