Lyn Balfour and Stephanie Salvilla have quite a bit in common.
They are both intelligent women. They are devoted mothers. They both made the fatal mistake of accidentally leaving their baby boys in their cars while they were at work.
And, due to a cruel trick of the brain, they both have false memories of dropping their children at day care on the respective mornings their sons died.
Lyn – a US army reservist who served twice in Iraq – left her nine-month-old son, Bryce, in the car for seven hours while she was at work in March 2004.
She went about her day, looking at pictures of her son, talking about her baby and planning to pick him up from day care. It wasn’t until she went to leave that she saw him in the backseat.
“I was hoping that it wasn’t too late so I started screaming for someone to call 911 and I took him out of the car and I began CPR,” Lyn told Seven’s Sunday Night.
Related: “This week, I left my baby in the car for five hours”.
“I prayed and I prayed to God to take me instead, to please, please not take him and after about another ten minutes another doctor came in and she told me that they couldn’t save him, that he was gone.
“And I sat there and said to myself, ‘How am I going to tell my husband that I killed his son?’
“If you would have asked me or given me a lie detector test, even today, I would tell you that he was at the day care provider’s house and that he was okay and that he was fine,” she said.
It’s a scenario eerily similar to that which caused baby Gannon’s death in July 2009.
Stephanie Salvilla was also convinced she had dropped the five-month-old at day care before continuing to work.
“I know now what really happened, but still to this day it’s the only memory I have,” she told Sunday Night.
Instead, her son sat in a car in the Florida sun for eight hours.
It doesn’t take long for a car in the sun to heat up. Seventy five per cent of the temperature rise occurs within five minutes of closing the car and ninety percent occurs within 15 minutes.
The temperature inside a car can be 30 degrees warmer than that outside and babies are particularly vulnerable, heating up at a rate three to five times faster than adults.
See what happens when the Sunday Night reporter sits inside a hot car in the sun:
Top Comments
What about setting a reminder to your phone to go off 30 minutes after your scheduled drop off time. This may not be foolproof, but better than nothing.
I did read about a young inventor who came up with a concept to put a weight plate under the baby seat. If that could somehow integrate with your car to stop you from locking the vehicle??
Another idea would be an app within the childcare system. You have to currently sign your baby in and usually put wake times etc. What about an electronic version, that automatically sends you a text or push notification if not entered by a certain time. Governments should be able to subsidise facilities to buy the hardware. I've already given the idea to a tech savvy friend..
Thinking about this, I realise that I was never at risk of forgetting my baby in the car. I don't have a better memory or less frazzled life than any other parent. I just have a 20 year old car. It's not high off the ground, does not have tinted windows and has to be locked and unlocked by placing a key into the door, meaning I cannot leap out and lock it from afar as I walk or run away. With all these features, I must lock the car facing the car, it is low and the windows clear, so I see everything inside the car before I leave it. I also used to tilt the rear view mirror to see the baby's head while I was driving.
Something -like the baby seat alarm suggested- which modifies the car to alert the parent/adult, seems like the way to go forward with this, given modern cars obscure visibility of their insides from the outside.
Sometimes, you can still miss that is staring you right in the face.
https://www.youtube.com/wat...
Dressing it in black helps!!!!!!!