“A parking lot generally has a paucity of facilities for dealing with foreseeable needs of the little one (food, potty, etc.).”
The little one is 8. Not knowing the whole story, I’ll reserve judgment, but, I just generally don’t think leaving an 8 year old with a 15 year old is in any way child endangerment.
Unless you left them in a alligator infested swamp or in a burning building or whatever, basically anywhere you couldn’t leave a kid with an adult.
Of course that parking lot could really run the gamut. They could have had blankets and pillows in the car, cheeseburgers, blankets and pillows, gameboys, cell phones, access to a nice toilet, or, they could have been huddled and miserable in a drug infested kind of wasteland.
The circumstances make all the difference.
I wouldn’t want to have a non emancipated teen caring for a preteen for a longer time than a shopping trip in a place where the toilets are all public toilets. At a private home would be a different story.