Mother Accused of Leaving Her 3-Year-Old in Hot Car Outside School

Stock image of a child and mother. Alicja/Pixabay

A mother has been arrested for leaving her 3-year-daughter alone in a hot car in Shelton on June 5.

Laura Boyle, 30, left her toddler alone in a car outside the Mohegan School while she dropped her 5-year-old off at the school, reported the WFSB.

The Shelton Police Department was notified of the toddler trapped inside the hot car at around 4 p.m. on Wednesday.

They found a 3-year-old in the backseat of a Honda Civic. It was approximately 77 degrees outside and the windows of the car were closed.

Authorities checked the surveillance video of the school and saw that Boyle left the child in the car and came back after 10 minutes to check on her. She then went back inside.

About 20 minutes later, the police arrived and rescued the child.

Fortunately, the child was unharmed and has been released to the father.

Man Charged for Leaving Disabled Client in Hot Car Where He Slowly Died

A man has been charged with involuntary manslaughter and elder abuse in connection with the death of an autistic man who was left alone in a hot car in West Covina last summer.

Emanuel Arellano was charged for the death of 51-year-old Timothy John Cortinas on May 31, reported KTLA5. Arellano was an employee of Easterseals, one of the organizations that provided services to Cortinas.

Cortinas suffered from multiple disabilities—from severe intellectual disability disorder, infantile autism, and seizure disorder. He was “borderline non-verbal and had the mental capacity of a child,” according to a last year’s report by KTLA5.

The lawsuit was filed last year on behalf of Irene Melendez, Cortinas’s mother, against Easterseals, San Gabriel/Pomona Valley’s Developmental Services, Holy Family Children’s Care, and Emanuel Arellano.

The wrongful death lawsuit alleged that the named parties were responsible for Cortina’s death.

Instead of driving Cortinas to the home facility in Walnut, Arellano drove him to his own home in the 300 block of South Frankurt Avenue in West Covina.

He left Cortinas in the car for several hours when the temperature outside was 100 degrees, leading him to slowly die.

Arellano never went to check on Cortinas in the car. One of his neighbors saw Cortinas in the car and alerted the police. Paramedics tried to revive him when they reached him 8:04 p.m., but he was pronounced dead at the scene.

“You have a special duty to these individuals, and to screw up on the magnitude–for lack of a better word–that they did is shocking,” family attorney Dean Aynechi told the media.

“We are pleased the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department agreed with us that Arellano’s negligent care of Timothy—leaving him to slowly die in a sweltering car on an August day when the outside temperature reached 97 degrees—amounts to involuntary manslaughter and abuse of a dependent adult,” Kamran Shahabi, one of the attorneys representing Cortinas, told KTLA5.

Melendez said she has been coping to live without her son.

“My heart is broken. To me, he was my purpose, and he was my life,” she told KTLA. “It’s just very hard and very difficult. I am going to the cemetery every week.”