A GRIEVING dad has told how his daughter was left to die in a roasting 62C car while her mum and boyfriend allegedly watched TV – and has called for greater safety measures.
Three-year-old Rylee was left in a Toyota Prado for six hours on a boiling hot 32C day, an Australian court heard.
Police allege mum and boyfriend Laura Peverill and Aaron Hill were watching Shameless on Netflix when they left Rylee in the car after returning from taking her older sisters to school.
Her mum then took her to hospital in Townsville, Queensland, but it was too late to save her as temperatures inside the car could have climbed above 60C.
Dad Peter Black said her death still gives him “nightmares”.
“Just thinking about what my little girl went through, it’s horrifying,” he told Nine News
“She was such a cheeky kid, always getting up to mischief, but she loved nothing more than snuggling up for a cuddle and a kiss.”
Rylee’s mother and boyfriend have been charged with manslaughter.
And Mr Black is also calling for the compulsory installation of child detection software in all new cars.
In honour of this daughter, Mr Black has begun a parliamentary petition, which has accumulated nearly 1500 signatures.
Open until December 29, it calls on the federal government to ensure the compulsory installation of electronic warning systems that detect children who have been left alone in all new vehicles.
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This could include in-car motion sensors and cameras which alert the driver or bystanders that a child or pet has been left behind.
“Currently there is no requirement in the Australian Design Rules for vehicles to include electronic warning systems for the detection of children left alone in vehicles, to alert relevant people to the imminent danger they are in,” he says in the petition.
“This leads to unnecessary loss of young life and significant grief for family, friends and the wider community.”
The government says it is “participating in discussions” about the idea.
Since 1998, almost 900 children have died in hot cars and more than half of them were left behind unknowingly by their caregiver, according to NoHeatStroke.org.
A leading expert in cognitive neuroscience who has studied the role of memory in such tragedies has found that the stresses parents face in everyday life can make these memory lapses more likely.
Forgetting a child is not a negligence problem but a memory problem, says David Diamond, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of South Florida in Tampa.
“The most common response is that only bad or negligent parents forget kids in cars,” Diamond says. “It’s a matter of circumstances. It can happen to everyone.”
During the summer, many families change their daily routines for vacations or other reasons, and that disruption is a common factor in these tragic incidents, Diamond’s research found.
“The worst thing any parent or caregiver can ever do is to think that something like this could never happen to them or someone in their family,” says Janette Fennell, founder and president of KidsAndCars.org, a group that tracks these incidents.
The tragedies occur at an alarming rate, and they cover a range of circumstances with the deaths spanning from 5-day-old babies to 14-year-olds. The earliest heatstroke death in 2020 occurred in April.
According to Kidsafe Australia, 10 children have died after being locked in a hot car, with over half those deaths occurring in Queensland.
According to NSW Ambulance, 2018 alone saw over 2250 children rescued from vehicles by paramedics and other emergency services.
Kidsafe Australia placed that number at over 5000.
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