Officials in northwest Georgia are still weighing if they’ll file charges against a Chickamauga couple they say left their 11-month-old grandson in a hot car Saturday, killing him.
Walker County Sheriff's Office officials said in a news release that the infant, Jaxon Taylor, was found unresponsive after being left inside an SUV for more than two hours as temperatures climbed above 90 degrees. Investigators are calling the death accidental, and an autopsy expected by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation will determine the infant's cause of death.
The infant had been with his grandparents, Kyle and Meta Hendershot of Chickamauga. When the couple, a daughter and another grandchild returned home from church around 3 p.m., police believe the infant was left in the car through miscommunication, the release said.
The boy was discovered in the car just after 5 p.m. after his mother, Mandie Hendershot, asked about her son when she woke from a midday nap. The mother works nights at Hutcheson Medical Center, officials said.
CPR was administered after the boy was found, but he was pronounced dead a short time later at the same hospital where his mother works.
She posted on Facebook early Sunday morning.
“My beautiful, happy, healthy golden haired, blue-eyed angel baby that I carried for nine months and labored for 23 hours to bring into the world is gone,” Hendershot wrote. “My mind is reeling with this horror, I can’t get it to stop from the most feared of all nightmares for every parent. My eleven month and eight day old infant is dead.”
Jaxon Taylor is the 19th child to die in a hot car in the United States this year and the first in Georgia, according to Janette Fennell, president and founder of KidsandCars.org.
Georgia ranks seventh in the nation for the number of children dying from heatstroke in vehicles in the past two decades, she said: A total of 28 of the 700 such deaths have been in the state.
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