Sentences Vary When Kids Die in Hot Cars

This undated photo of Leon T. Jewell was released by the Kentucky Dept. of Corrections. Jewell, of Lexington, Ky., said he was drunk when he left his 9-month-old son, Daniel, in a car in August 2005. He pleaded guilty to second-degree manslaughter, but a merciful judge sentenced him to seven years' probation and ordered him into rehab. After becoming drunk on what would have been Daniel's second birthday, the distraught Jewell was kicked out of rehab. He is now serving out his sentence in a Kentucky prison. (AP Photo/Kentucky Dept. of Corrections) (AP)

"When you look at overall who this is happening to, it's some very, very, very good parents _ might I say, doting parents," says Janette Fennell, founder and president of Kids and Cars, a nonprofit group that tracks child deaths and injuries in and around automobiles.

"But no one thinks it's going to happen to them. I think people are lying if they say that there wasn't one situation in raising their child that, `There but for the grace of God go I.'"

The AP's analysis was based largely on a database of fatal hyperthermia cases compiled by Fennell's organization. The AP contacted medical examiner's offices in several states where this most often occurs, and the group's numbers coincided almost exactly with recorded hyperthermia deaths.

Some of these children crawled into cars or trunks on their own, but most were left to die by a caregiver. Most often, it was a parent who simply forgot the child was inside.

Texas leads the nation with at least 41 deaths, followed by Florida with 37, California with 32, North Carolina and Arizona with 14 apiece, and Tennessee with 13. There were deaths recorded in 44 states _ most in the Sun Belt, but many in places not known for hot weather.

The correlation between the rise in these deaths and the 1990s move to put children in the back seat is striking.

"Up to that time, the average number of children dying of hyperthermia in the United States was about 11 a year," says Jan Null, an adjunct professor of meteorology at San Francisco State University who has studied this trend. "Then we put them in the back, turned the car seats around. And from '98 to 2006, that number is 36 a year."

Few understand just how quickly a car can heat up, even on a moderate day.

According to one study, the temperature inside a vehicle can rise more than 40 degrees in the span of an hour, with 80 percent of that increase occurring during the first half hour. And researchers found that cracking the windows did little to help.

Children, often too young to escape, are particularly vulnerable because their immature respiratory and circulatory systems do not manage heat as efficiently as adults'. After a short time, the skin grows red and dry, the body becomes unable to produce sweat, and heat stroke kills the child.

Already this year, at least 16 children have died in hot vehicles from Hawaii to Virginia _ including a 4-year-old New Orleans boy who died on Father's Day.

Since 1998, charges were filed in 49 percent of cases. In those that have been decided, 81 percent resulted in convictions or guilty pleas, and half of those brought jail sentences _ the median sentence being two years. Parents were only slightly less likely to be charged and convicted than others, but the median sentence was much higher _ 54 months.