A few days after similar case, a parked car on a hot day becomes a deathtrap.
By REBECCA ANNA STOILjp.services1(photo credit: )
The heat wave gripping Israel over the past two weeks took another casualty on Tuesday when a four-year-old boy succumbed to heatstroke in east Jerusalem.
The boy's family had traveled from their apartment in the capital's Shuafat neighborhood to the Dahiyat el-Barid neighborhood, where they own a house, according to the initial investigation performed by the Judea and Samaria District Police.
The family, all of whom are Israeli citizens, arrived at the house and all four of their children left the vehicle and entered the house. But at one point, the family's three daughters and one son went back outside to play while the mother prepared food.
When the mother called the children to come to eat, only the girls came.
The mother tried to find her son, and then called her husband. The two parents began to comb the area, and the father found the boy lying unconscious on the car's rear seat.
He rushed his son to a nearby medical clinic, where doctors turned the boy over to a MDA team that took him to Hadassah-University Hospital on Mount Scopus. But he was dead on arrival.
The boy's father confirmed to police that he had not locked the family's car. The parents told investigators that the boy could only have been in the vehicle for 20 to 30 minutes, and that they thought he may have crawled into the back seat to take a nap.
According to the father, the car was still unlocked when he found his son unconscious inside. The vehicle, which is black, may have reached temperatures approaching 45 degrees in the midday sun.
After the incident, security forces would not grant permission to enter Dahiyat el-Barid, and so it took more than an hour for the vehicle to be brought to the local police station for forensic analysis.
On Thursday, six-month-old Ophir Balilti died after her father left her in her car seat for more than an hour while he visited a Kibbutz Sha'ar Ha'amakim repair garage in the North. Magen David Adom medics found the baby not breathing, with third-degree burns on her shoulders and stomach, apparently from over-exposure to the sun. The car's windows were all closed.
