A 6-year-old Minnesota girl died and her sister was injured after a man set his van on fire while cooking inside a Walmart parking lot.
“My daughter Taraji, she’s fighting still,” Essie McKenzie told the outlet. “She’s fighting real hard.”
McKenzie said that she let her daughters sleep inside the van after going shopping at Walmart at 7 a.m. after they had awoken to drop McKenzie’s son and her mother off at the airport.
Police said that Hipolito’s van was parked next to their van. He was cooking something and placed the stove in the back of his van, and it apparently hadn’t cooled properly.
The flames of the van caught the Dodge Caravan, which housed the sleeping girls, on fire, officials said.
Hipolito was charged with one count of second-degree manslaughter and two counts of negligent fire, the report said.
“I know that there’s a lot of people that are being negative towards my sister, like ‘why would she leave the kids in the car?’ and that type of stuff,” Essie’s sister, Alexis McKenzie told the outlet. “But at the end of the day, she’s a single mother who is raising three kids by herself with no help. None at all.”
“It could happen to anybody. That could have been anybody,” McKenzie continued. “They wasn’t babies in that car. It was big kids. ‘Cause if they was alive and if they had seen what was going on, I bet my last dollar the girls would have got out of the car on their own.”
“She was so mature for her age, she was only six years old but she knew so much, she taught me a lot of things in her six years she’s been here on this earth,” the mother said.
She said she is focusing on her 9-year-old daughter’s recovery.
“I was always a praying mother, you know, I’m trying to keep that same routine to keep my spirits up,” she said.
Facts About Crime in the United States
Violent crime in the United States has fallen sharply over the past 25 years, according to both the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) (pdf).While the overall rate of violent crime has seen a steady downward drop since its peak in the 1990s, there have been several upticks that bucked the trend. Between 2014 and 2016, the murder rate increased by more than 20 percent, to 5.4 per 100,000 residents, from 4.4, according to an Epoch Times analysis of FBI data. The last two-year period that the rate soared so quickly was between 1966 and 1968.