‘Nothing compares to this’: Baby dies after being left in hot car in Lexington, officials say

LEXINGTON, Mass. — A death investigation is underway after an infant was found unresponsive inside a hot car in a parking lot in Lexington on Tuesday, authorities announced Wednesday.

Emergency crews responding to a parking lot on Massachusetts Avenue around 5:30 p.m. found an unresponsive 1-year-old boy inside a vehicle, according to Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan.

The boy, whose name hasn’t been released, was rushed to an area hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

When questioned about the infant’s death at a water safety event in Framingham, Ryan said the investigation was “still in the really early stages.”

“When we arrived on scene we did, in fact, find a one-year-old child, approximate age, who was deceased,” said Chief Derek Sencabaugh of the Lexington Fire Department. “On a day-to-day basis, we see a lot of terrible things. But nothing compares to something like this.”

Boston 25 News learned that the child attended a daycare located in the building, Sol-Solecito. The founder of the business, Nelly Mayorga, said in a statement that the boy was supposed to have been at daycare yesterday, but did not show up. Their policy, she said, was to take attendance by 8:45 a.m. and to send a message to parents of children not there.

In this case, that was done around 9 a.m. But they never heard from the mom, Mayorga said.

At 5:20 p.m., the mom in question showed up to pick up her son, Mayorga said. When staff told her he wasn’t there she became agitated. A staffer then asked a key question... if your son was never here today where would he be? At that point, Mayorga said, the mom ran out to her car and found the baby unresponsive. The daycare called 9-1-1 but the baby was pronounced dead at a local hospital.

The Middlesex District Attorney’s Office says a preliminary investigation suggests the child never entered the daycare and that he may have been in the car for an extended time. The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner will determine the cause of death for the child.

While it might seem unbelievable that a parent could forget a child in the car, it happens too often, said Amber Rollins, director of Kids And Car Safety. Rollins has been studying the issue of children dying in cars for the last 20 years. She says a pivotal change in how young children were transported had tragic, unanticipated consequences.

“Children used to ride in the front seat with us,” Rollins said. “But then airbags were added to vehicles and they were overpowered airbags that were literally killing children.”

Rollins said that led to a big national campaign to put children in the back seat.

“People listened,” she said. “It was a very successful campaign.”

And that’s when kids started dying in cars in numbers. Rollins said about 40 times a year such tragedies happen in the U.S. — and the overwhelming majority — 85% — are due to parents forgetting a child is in the car.

“You’ve got a young child who is in a rear-facing car seat,” she said. “You can’t see them from the driver’s seat, you can’t hear them because they all fall asleep the second you start driving.”

Add to that a sleep-deprived, stressed-out parent and you have the makings of a tragedy, Rollins said — and it’s one that, at its core, has a biological cause.

“What happens when we’re extremely stressed out and overwhelmed is a part of our memory system called the basal ganglia kicks in,” she said “Our basal ganglia controls our habit memories.”

That is, the daily activities you can almost do in your sleep.

“We operate in autopilot mode all the time,” Rollins said. “Sort of this reptilian survival part of our brain. The problem with the basal ganglia is, it cannot account for changes in routine.”

And even slight changes in routine can lead to disaster, she said.

“You can drive straight past daycare and go to work never realizing that you didn’t make that drop off,” Rollins said. “This is something that you just don’t recover from. Losing a child is the worst thing anybody can experience.”

It wasn’t immediately clear if police were considering criminal charges in connection with the death.

Ryan said more information would be made available “later today.”

This is a developing story. Check back for updates as more information becomes available.

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