Child forgotten in van by Talmud teacher dies

Police are questioning a Breslov hassid teacher who allegedly forgot the boy after bringing him to class in Modi'in Illit.

By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH, YAAKOV LAPPIN
child safety sticker 311 (photo credit: United Hatzalah)
child safety sticker 311
(photo credit: United Hatzalah)
A five-year-old child accidentally locked inside a van died in Modi’in Illit on Thursday.
Police are questioning a Breslov hassidic teacher who allegedly forgot the boy in the vehicle. The child attended the teacher’s Talmud Torah class.
A United Hatzalah doctor and Magen David Adom paramedics found the child unconscious and not breathing in the vehicle and tried to save his life, but were not successful.
The teacher was distraught, as he had volunteered to take the child to class but forgot him in the vehicle and remembered only hours after arriving.
Emergency services were called to Hezkel Street in Modi’in Illit around 1 p.m.
“The paramedics tried to resuscitate him for a long period of time, but finally pronounced him dead,” Magen David Adom spokesman Zaki Heller told Channel 10 News.
Police believe the child was trapped in the van for two hours, dehydrated and suffered heat stroke before ceasing to breathe.
Every summer, there are several cases of deaths or near-deaths among children left in their parents’ vehicles or school vans because the drivers didn’t ensure that no children remained inside.
Deputy Health Minister Ya’acov Litzman has repeatedly rejected suggestions that drivers be required to affix a sticker to their vehicle’s door or window reminding them to check the car for any children.
Litzman has said it “wouldn’t work,” as has Health Ministry director-general Prof. Ronni Gamzu, who said he would first require proof of its efficacy in medical journals.
Eli Beer, the founder of United Hatzalah, the voluntary life-saving and rescue organization, has created such stickers at his own expense. In the last year, hundreds of thousands of them have been printed by United Hatzalah with financing by an insurance company.
Beer said he had reports that the stickers, which have even reached the US, have saved lives and that he has heard of specific cases.
No comment was available Thursday from the ministry about the Modi’in Illit tragedy or why it had not supported the sticker proposal.