2YO M’sia Girl Died After Mother Accidentally Locked Her In a Car for 3 Hours

The level of negligence humanity has these days is really bad.

Innocent lives are being lost because of a careless mistake and ignorance.

Leaving animals in the car? Yes.

Leaving children in the car? Yes.

There have been countless incidents of tragic deaths due to being locked in a car for too long, and this happens to be one of those unfortunate cases.

Left Behind

According to the Lahad Datu police chief Assistant Comm Nasri Mansor, the victim’s mother had picked up her two kids from school around 1 pm on that day.

When they reached home, her mother parked the car and told her eldest daughter to bring the victim out of the vehicle. After which, she did not check if the instructions were followed.

Later on, she went upstairs for daily prayers and fell asleep shortly after.

Discovered Unconscious 

In a statement, Nasri said, “At 3.35pm, she woke up and went downstairs to cook for her children. She called for the victim, but the little girl was nowhere to be found. The mother panicked and rushed around the house looking for her daughter to no avail. She finally discovered the victim who was unconscious, lying in the back of the car.”

Very unfortunate.

By that time, the girl had been trapped in the car for about three hours. She was rushed to the hospital for emergency treatment, but it was too late.

The post-mortem revealed that the girl suffered burns on her body due to the heat in the car after she passed away.

Too Hot

Burns to the skin can be caused by temperatures as low as 44 Degrees Celcius for a long time. High temperatures such as 80 Degrees Celcius and higher can cause more severe burns in shorter periods of time.

So you can only imagine how hot it must have been in the car and the amount of pain the girl had gone through before eventually passing away.

The cause of death was also revealed to be the temperature in the car that was too high as well.

The girl’s mother has been arrested after the medical officer filed a police report.

The case will also be investigated under Section 304A of the Penal Code in Malaysia for causing death by negligence.

What Really Happens

What really happens to a child locked in a hot car for hours? Every year, many young children such as babies and toddlers die due to being left in a hot car.

In 2013, a video on vehicular heat stroke was released as a PSA to parents. The video is a simple reenactment of a mother leaving her child in the car to pick up a few things in a store.

In the video, the mother is portrayed as an ordinary lady who looks like any other mother out there. That’s what makes it distressing.

And by the end of her shopping trip, she comes back to a devastating scene where a crowd is gathered outside her car and her child is unconscious. And the moral of the story is, one decision makes a big difference.

Here’s the video. Do caution, because there are distressing scenes in it.

So the next time you want to leave your pet or toddler in the car while you do something “quickly”, think twice.