6-month-old Georgia boy dies 8 days after being left in car

ajc.com

Middle Georgia police are investigating the death of a 6-month-old boy left inside a parked car. The child is third to die this year in Georgia after being left in a car.

Milledgeville police were called Aug. 28 to a Brantley Way home, where the infant was found inside the car, according to Felicia Cummings, department spokeswoman. No details were released on how long the baby may have been in the car or whether his injuries were heat-related.

The baby, Cyrus Gray, was first taken to Oconee Regional Medical Center in Milledgeville before being transferred to Navicent Health in Macon, police said. Cyrus died at the hospital Tuesday morning, Cummings said.

The GBI is expected to conduct an autopsy. No charges had been filed in the case late Wednesday.

Cyrus was the third child to die after being left car this year in Georgia, which ranks fifth in the nation for hot-car deaths. Since 1995, 35 children in Georgia have died after being left inside cars, and 33 have died this year across the U.S., according to the Kids and Cars organization.

On July 28, a 3-year-old died being locked inside a hot car parked at the family’s Reidsville home, about 200 miles southeast of Atlanta, according to investigators. The GBI arrested the boy’s mother, Jamie Lee Camacho, 24, and charged her with felony murder and cruelty to children in the second degree.

And in June, Dijanelle Fowler, 25, left her baby in the car for six hours while she was inside a hair salon, according to DeKalb County police. Skylar Fowler was found dead in an Emory University Hospital parking deck after her mother drove there and called 911, reporting that she herself was having a seizure, The AJC previously reported.

Dijanelle Fowler, a former high school and college basketball standout from South Carolina, told investigators different versions of what happened to her baby, according to court testimony following her arrest. But Fowler told the baby’s father she’d left the baby in the car with the air conditioning on, but it had shut off.

On Wednesday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill to require technology that will help prevent children from dying of heatstroke in cars.

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