But did he do the right thing?
Is it “mum shaming” or speaking up?
Is it interfering or a being a good citizen?
Should bystanders speak up or mind their own business?
A video of a young man confronting a mother who left her baby locked in a hot car is dividing opinion across the world.
Californian man Carl Paz was walking past a mobile phone shop in Torrance, California, when he noticed the baby inside the car with the windows all closed.
He told CBS Local his uncle pointed out the child.
“He was crying and my uncle made a comment, ‘Man, that’s just, that’s sick. That’s wrong,’ ” he said.
He said he waited about two minutes, looked again, “double-take inside the car for about five seconds, decided it was wrong and I headed inside the store.”
The temperature on that Californian day was around 27 degrees.
So Paz walked inside the mobile phone store to confront the child’s mother.
“Who’s the one who left the baby in the car?” Paz asks.
“Yea, he’s right there,” the mother replies.
“But why?”
“But why? Because I’m standing right here.”
She says that because she can see the car it is okay.
“He’s not crying, I’m watching him,” she adds “I don’t care what you got to say, really.”
The two go back and forth with Paz telling the mother the baby is crying. She denies it. The sales assistant gets fed up with Paz and threatens to call the police on him.
Finally after a tense and lengthy confrontation she goes to retrieve the baby.
Carl Pax told KFiam Radio the mother left the baby for at least eight minutes.
Eight long minutes in which the child would have been exposed to temperature levels of nearly 40 degrees.
The Department of Geosciences, San Francisco State University, have shown that within 10 minutes the temperature in an enclosed vehicle will rise an average of 19 degrees or 82 percent of its eventual one hour rise.
But after the situation resolved, after the mother retrieved her crying baby, what Paz did next left some scratching their heads – he uploaded the video he had taken to social media.
Paz says he uploaded it because it was not right and he wanted to “spread awareness”
Others say he should have just taken it to the police and didn’t need to take to Facebook and “shame the mother.”
He later wrote on Facebook “Remember to share this, and tag your local news station. I wanna let everyone know about what happened here. This is just straight up NOT right.
Never feel discouraged to speak up when you see something wrong.”
The video has now been viewed over 975,000 times since it was uploaded to Facebook.
See it here:
Top Comments
I think filming her was the only way to get her to listen, she sounds like an arrogant woman who doesn't care if her baby is 'cooking' in the car by himself!! Good on you for shaming this woman, I hope it gets other people thinking!
I'm so over people filming others and putting it online. So what she left her kid in a dangerous situation. You know what? It's not anyone else's place to spread her face or name around. Tell her off yes. Report to the police yes. Report to DOCS yes. Put her face up for the world to see no. He has no right to do that. And I highly doubt you have the right to put her face on your site either.