Nebraska woman arrested after death of 5-year-old left alone in car for hours

A woman was arrested this week in connection with the death of her five-year-old foster son after he was found unconscious in an overheated car in Omaha, Nebraska.

Omaha police said 40-year-old Juanita Pinon was charged with child abuse by neglect resulting in death after the boy was discovered in the car shortly after 5 p.m. local time on Wednesday.

The car was parked in a parking lot outside the beauty salon where Pinon worked, police spokesman Chris Gordon told NBC News. He added that the child was left unattended in the car for about seven hours while Pinon worked. He was taken to a hospital where he was pronounced dead, police said.

Pinon did not answer police questions about whether she knowingly left the boy in the car or whether it was an accident, Gordon said.

The Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the foster care system, did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Pinon’s foster care history. She is currently being held by the Douglas County Department of Corrections.

An autopsy will be performed to determine whether the boy died from heat exposure or another cause, Gordon said Friday.

If he died from the heat, he would be at least the 10th child to die in a hot car in 2024, according to KidsAndCars.org, a nonprofit organization dedicated to saving children’s lives in and around cars.

In Omaha, the temperature was 90 degrees Fahrenheit on Wednesday. But it can be much hotter inside cars than outside, says Janette Fennell, founder and president of KidsAndCars.org.

“Think of the temperature inside a vehicle as being like a greenhouse. You have a vehicle with a lot of glass in it, and depending on what angle you’re at to the sun, it heats up very quickly,” she said, adding that opening the windows a crack is not enough to cool a car. “We’ve actually documented deaths where outside temperatures were just above 15 degrees.”

KidsAndCars.org found that since 1990, nearly 1,100 children ages 14 and younger have died in overheated cars, the vast majority of whom were ages 3 and younger. Most of the deaths occurred when parents or other caregivers unknowingly left their child in the car, according to the organization’s statistics.

In such cases, research has shown that drivers did not actually forget their children. Rather, they went on autopilot as they drove to work or another familiar destination, sometimes creating a false memory of dropping the child off at daycare or with another caregiver, Fennell said. Changes in routine — such as a different parent than usual dropping the baby off at daycare — are often a factor in such deaths.

In other cases, Fennell said, deaths in overheated cars occur because children get into the car without adults noticing, or because parents knowingly leave their children in the car while they run errands that take longer than expected.

“Some people don’t understand, first of all, how dangerous it is and, secondly, how quickly a car heats up,” she said, adding that 80% of the temperature rise inside can occur in the first 10 minutes, depending on whether the car is parked in the sun or shade. “Everyone thinks, ‘I’m just going to be gone for a minute.’ But you really can’t predict that.”

To prevent such tragedies, Fennell suggested the following steps:

• Never intentionally leave children unattended in the car.
• After you put your child in the car seat, leave one item in the back seat that “you really can’t start your day without,” Fennell said. That could be a cellphone, purse, employee ID or even a shoe.
• Ask your daycare center to contact you if your child does not come at the usual time and you have not called to say that the child is home sick or on vacation.

Fennell and other safety activists also want federal regulations to help prevent such tragedies. While many automakers have voluntarily installed software that reminds drivers to check the back seat when getting out, KidsAndCars.org is pushing for the mandatory installation of technology that can detect and alert drivers when a child is left in the back seat.

Congress has tasked the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration with issuing a standard requiring that new passenger vehicles be equipped with technology that can prevent deaths and injuries caused by overheating cars. But the agency has repeatedly failed to meet congressional deadlines and is not expected to issue a proposed regulation until next year.