1-Year-Old Died In Hot Car
A 25-year-old woman in Georgia, Dijanelle Fowler, has been arrested and charged with second-degree murder, child cruelty, and concealing the death of her 1-year-old daughter, who police say died after being left in a hot car for six hours.
Fowler arrived for her hair appointment in Tucker, Georgia at 10.04am on June 15, and left her one-year-old daughter Skylar in the car. She reportedly left the air conditioning on, but the car died soon after she left the vehicle.
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Surveillance video shows Fowler returning to her car at 4pm, at which point she didn’t call police, but got a man at the salon’s help in restarting her car. Police believe that at this point, Fowler daughter was dead. Warrants revealed that the man who helped most likely never saw the child’s body because there were “lots of clothes” to cover her. Fowler texted the child’s godfather about an hour later — telling him that she was heading to an urgent care facility for headaches. Records show she searched the internet for signs of having a seizure around the same time. Police say she then drove around for hours with her dead baby in the car before calling 911 from a parking garage at Emory University Hospital to report having a “seizure of some kind” but did not mention her daughter. Her daughter was found dead in the back seat. Police initially believed the child died during Fowler’s visit to the hospital — but her timeline of events didn’t add up, and an autopsy suggested the little girl had been dead for a longer period of time.
WHAT THE LAW SAYS
Laws for leaving kids in car vary from state to state. Only 20 states in the US have laws that specifically make it illegal to leave a child unattended in a vehicle. States without kids-in-cars laws still may prosecute parents under child endangerment statutes, which can be interpreted in wildly different ways. Find out what the law says in your state.
In the UK, it is illegal to leave a child alone if it places them at risk. The gov.uk website states: Use your judgement on how mature your child is before you decide to leave them alone, e.g. at home or in a car. “Parents [people] can be prosecuted if they leave a child unsupervised ‘in a manner likely to cause unnecessary suffering or injury to health’ “.
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