Kennesaw police said a 5-month-old girl who died after being left in a parked car for more than five hours was left in the car by her 21-year-old cousin.
Kennesaw PD spokesman Scott Luther told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that little is known about the case so far because the cousin has been “too distraught” to interview. He said they would talk to the cousin later.
Police have not released the name of the girl or the cousin.
On Wednesday, the girl was left in a car seat inside a car parked at Ivy Hall Day School, where the cousin worked.
"Several hours later, the baby was found unresponsive inside the car and after attempts to revive her, she was pronounced deceased at the incident location," Luther said earlier.
Jan Null, a researcher in the Department of Geosciences at San Francisco State University, said his research has found temperatures in a car can quickly rise to deadly levels.
The high temperature in Kennesaw Wednesday afternoon was 90 degrees, and that most likely meant the inside air temperature could have been as high as 135 degrees, Null said. It would have been "significantly hotter" if the child was in direct sunlight, he said.
Null estimated that the temperature inside the car probably would have reached 109 degrees within the first 10 minutes. “When a body gets to 104 degrees, that’s the clinical definition of heat stroke,” Null said.
Five children have died so far this year because they were left in cars. A 1-year-old girl died in Austin, Texas, on Wednesday. The other deaths were in Lyndon, Ky., last Saturday, in Patterson, La., on March 17 and in New Braunfels, Texas, on March 8.
Nineteen states have laws prohibiting leaving children unattended in cars. Such a law was proposed in Georgia in 2004 but failed to pass the Legislature.
“It happens to a lot of people,” Null said. “There have been doctors and school principals and day-care owners. People across the board.”
And in half those cases it was because people simply forgot the child was in the backseat, Null said.
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