There STILL are morons out there who leave their kids in hot cars

This is the second one in less than a week.

These people should be forced to sit in a hot car for a couple of hours as punishment.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38707338/ns/us_news

 

And you should read Gene Weingarten's amazing Wash Post Magazine piece about the parents in these cases, and how most of them would pretty much love to kill themselves after the fact, they're so tortured by what happened.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/27/AR2009022701549.html

 

Remorse after the fact does not excuse the crime. Many a drunk driver are probably beside themselves with it after killing innocents, too. Doesn't change the fact that they caused the death.

 

Tread lightly here, people.

Sure there are guilty people doing this, but people make honest mistakes. Sometimes it costs them a child.

 

Those frothing at the mouth should familiarize themselves with the story.

No one left these kids in a car. A teen sister was babysitting. The kids ran off and climbed into a neighbor's car. They were found later.

 

I read that when it came out last year, it's haunted me ever since.

 

It my town in SoCal's Inland Empire, every August some group goes around and hangs purple ribbons from every single streetsign in town -- thousands of them -- as a reminder to not lock your kid in your car.

All I can say is, good grief. If you can't remember you've got a child in your car, you deserve all the grief you get.

 

Drunk driving has no comparison with parents leaving their kids in the car, Killick. It doesn't come fucking close.

I remember a celebrated local case here when a hospital administrator loaded the kids up in the car, dropped all of them off to where they needed to go. Forgot about the baby in the van as she was rushing to the hospital for a set of meetings all day.

If anything, this has to remind people to drop the cell phone, clear out the distractions, and all of the other crap when it comes to dealing with your kids in a car.

 

You're right. That wasn't an apt comparison. My point was, however, that plenty of crimes — widely accepted by all as crimes — result in remorse by the perpetrator afterwards. It still doesn't excuse the crime, which more often than not is just recklessness.

Should these parents be drawn and quartered? Hell, no. But neither should they be excused because they've "suffered enough."

 

Which, of course, no one is doing.

 

This.

 

As others have said, those of you frothing at the mouth really, really need to read that Weingarten story. It is one of the most powerful pieces you will ever read. The "morons" you refer to are doctors, successful businessmen etc. who, because of a seemingly minor change in their daily routine, were thrown off enough that the auto-pilot functions of their brain -- the functions we all have -- didn't register that they hadn't dropped their kids off.

Have you ever gotten in your car to drive somewhere and gotten a mile in the other direction before you realized what you were doing? That's what happened to these people, only the part that slipped out of their brain was not the ending destination but a stopover point. Then when they got to their destination, their brains proceeded with the rest of the day. Read the story and the words "basal ganglia" will stick with you forever.

I used to think these were the most irresponsible people in the world too. Then I read the story. And for what it's worth, if you believe Gene Weingarten is worthy of his Pulitzers and his place atop the journalism world, you should know that the genesis of this story was the time he was so distracted that he forgot to drop his daughter at day care on his way to work, in Miami during the summer. The only reason she isn't dead is because, as he was getting out of the car, she asked him why he didn't drop her off. That was the first he realized she was in the car.