A Tennessee woman has been accused of leaving a seven-month-old baby unattended in a hot car for eight hours while she worked, resulting in the infant's death. Linda Stevens, 69, was arrested on Friday and charged with criminally negligent homicide for allegedly leaving her foster grandson, Gabrielle Alonzo, in her car from 8am to 4pm on April 15, causing the child to die.
What Happened
The baby's foster mother had entrusted Stevens, her own mother, to drop the baby off at daycare on her way to work at a public library in Monterey, according to Putnam County Sheriff Eddie Farris, who spoke to WKRN. Stevens confirmed to police that her plan had been to drop off the infant, 'but she did not,' said Bryant Dunaway, the District Attorney General for the 13th Judicial District of Tennessee.
The prosecutor explained that earlier this month, Stevens placed the seven-month-old in a child car seat secured with a seatbelt in the back of her vehicle before driving to the Monterey Branch Library. Upon arrival, she clocked into work and left the baby in her locked car in the library's parking lot, which has little shade, Dunaway continued.
When Alonzo never showed up at the daycare, the staff called the baby's foster mother, who in turn called Stevens. It was only then that the foster grandmother went to check on the infant, and a 911 call was placed about an unconscious child in a car around 4pm, Dunaway said.
Emergency Response
Officers with the Monterey Police Department responded to the call, but by the time they arrived, the baby was already dead. Farris told WKRN that officers attempted to perform CPR, but the life-saving measures were unsuccessful. Temperatures in Monterey reached a high of 82F on that cloudless day, according to The Weather Channel. Under those conditions, temperatures inside the vehicle could have reached between 140F and 155F, according to a hot car calculator. It may have taken just around an hour for Alonzo's internal body temperature to reach the life-threatening threshold of 104F. He was in the car eight times longer than that.
Legal Proceedings
The Putnam County Sheriff's Office investigated the case and obtained Stevens's arrest warrant, which they served on Friday. Stevens was booked into the Putnam County Jail that morning and given a $50,000 bond. She posted bail and was released the same day, according to the jail's records. She will enter a plea at a later court date. If convicted of her criminally negligent homicide charge, she will face a sentence of up to six years in prison.
National Statistics on Hot Car Deaths
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), 52 percent of hot car deaths occur because someone forgets a child in a vehicle. About 47 percent of the time a child was forgotten, the caregiver was supposed to have dropped them off at a daycare or preschool, and about 55 percent of the children who have died in hot cars were less than two years old, the NHTSA added. All of those statistics are in line with the way Alonzo died earlier this month.
