Posted on 09/04/2002 6:04:39 AM PDT by Between the Lines
CONOVER - A 10-week-old baby died in a car that caught fire in a school parking lot Tuesday while the baby's mother was inside the building, picking up another child from an after-school program.
Authorities believe the mother drove into the lot outside Lyle Creek Elementary School in Conover, just east of Hickory, about 3:35 p.m. The mother had two of her children with her: a 3-year-old boy and the infant, in a car seat behind the driver, said Conover police Capt. Steve Brewer.
She left both children in the car while she went inside to fetch her third child, a kindergartner, Brewer said. A few minutes later, the 3-year-old ran into the school building, found his mother and told her the car was on fire, he said. A witness, Tracy Caldwell, said he heard a "faint little boom," turned around and saw fire and smoke coming from the car.
The mother tried to open the car door, but it was too hot; she sustained minor burns on her hands and was taken to nearby Catawba Valley Medical Center, Brewer said. The 3-year-old was unharmed.
Conover police and the N.C. State Bureau of Investigation were trying late Tuesday to determine the origin and cause of the fire, Brewer said. Investigators didn't know whether the car was left running in the lot or where the fire started. No charges have been filed.
The identities of the mother and her children were not released Tuesday night. The infant's gender also was not released.
By evening, SBI agents were closely inspecting the car, a purple Mitsubishi Eclipse parked about 100 feet from a side entrance.
"You see a whole lot of things in this profession," Brewer said, "but you'll never get used to something like this."
Caldwell was one of four N.C. Department of Transportation road workers preparing to go home after a day of planting grass near the school parking lot entrance on C&B Farm Road. Caldwell, also the chief of the Bandys Volunteer Fire Department in southern Catawba County, was walking to his truck when he heard the faint boom, a sound he said he'd heard before in car fires.
"I turned and looked and saw the fire and smoke," he said. "I had my fire walkie (radio) with me, and I called in to communications and said we had a vehicle fire at Lyle Creek Elementary."
He and the other three workers jumped into their trucks and drove to the car, which was quickly engulfed in flames, he said. The workers had fire extinguishers with them, and teachers and other school personnel brought others from inside. "At one point," Caldwell said, "we had fire extinguishers everywhere."
Caldwell said he and the other workers didn't know a child was in the car as they approached it, and he declined to say when they found out.
They got the fire down to a smolder within a few minutes; Caldwell wouldn't say how long it took the workers to get it under control, but Brewer said the fire probably lasted between seven and 10 minutes.
The after-school program, Pryme Time, is run by the YMCA of Catawba Valley. Lyle Creek, which opened last fall, is the only school that has the program.
CEO Gary Hogue said Tuesday that he planned to meet today with his board members to discuss how they might help the family.
"It's hard for us to put ourselves in that family's shoes right now, but we're going to do what we can to help them," Hogue said. "Because we feel we've had a loss, too."
I did bother to look up the meaning of a term used in law but, it's not really politically correct!
Main Entry: involuntary manslaughter
Function: noun
Date: circa 1879
: manslaughter resulting from the failure to perform a legal duty expressly required to safeguard human life, from the commission of an unlawful act not constituting a felony, or from the commission of a lawful act in a negligent or improper manner
No, you just talk about them behind their back. We'll just add "coward" to our list of observations about your posts in this thread. "Troll" has already been taken.
Troll?
Personally, I've left each of my six children alone in the car when I've brought groceries into the house, stopped for gas, dropped something off at the dry cleaners, etc. Had anything happened to any of my children should I have been sent to jail? Possibly, but the greatest punishment I can imagine is living with the knowledge that I was responsible for creating a situation in which my child was injured. A prison sentence would be far easier for most parents to face than to have to face the loss of their child (especially if the parent were responsible).
Its a crying shame that the baby who is the subject of the story in this thread no longer has one, due to a mother's carelessness. Its even more shameful that some here would attempt to commandeer that tragedy so they can dance in the blood of a dead baby for a questionable political objective.
How many cars have you had burst into flames on you when you left it idling for a few minutes? How many of your friends?
It must be wonderful to be so perfect that nothing you ever do could be second-guessed by some voyeur without a life.
Zero.
How many of your friends?
Zero.
How many times have you left your paycheck on your dashboard, in plain sight, while you nipped into the welfare office or liquor store?
You truly are an idiot. A sanctimonious one at that.
This is what you said
How many times have you left your paycheck on your dashboard, in plain sight, while you nipped into the welfare office or liquor store?
You are so whacked out that you expect me to dignify that with an answer? Go take some more Prozac.
I was walking down a street one day (years ago) when I saw a parked car (that wasn't running) blow up and flames were shooting out of it. I didn't think a car that wasn't running could do that, either.
Then again, maybe the woman in the story left the car running to keep the A/C on. This incident was a horrible tragedy. I don't think it's unusual for mothers to leave their younger children in a car for a few minutes while they pick-up another child at school. My children don't attend school, but, when my one son did for a short period, I saw mothers do that all the time. The school grounds weren't big, and they were able to keep an eye on the car while they waited for their older child to come out of school. (And, no, I wasn't one of them. I didn't have a car and walked my son to school). But, I never considered what they did to be neglectful in any way.
If you wouldn't leave the reward for two weeks of cleaning grease traps out on your dashboard, then how can you advocate leaving your own flesh and blood in a vehicle alone?
How many children do/did you have?
How many of them remained sane in spite of you?
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