A charge of culpable homicide could be laid after a two-year-old girl died after being left in a hot car by a child minder.
A charge of culpable homicide could be laid after a two-year-old girl died in Johannesburg after being left in a hot car by a child minder.
The child minder went shopping and left the child in the locked car . A doctor at the Netcar Travel Clinic told that the temperature inside the closed car could have reached about 50 degC.
The child was rushed to the Garden City Clinic by staff at a store. “A customer left the child in the car and came in to do some shopping. She must have been gone for about an hour or so, and by the time she got back to the car the child was dead. She started screaming so the staff ran to help and tried CPR,” store manager Surenda Bhawan Suroobhai told the newspaper.
The case has been forwarded to the director of public prosecutions. No arrests have been made.
Captain Schalk Bornman, a Johannesburg police spokesperson, said a charge of culpable homicide could be laid. “The police would like to appeal to the public not to leave children in a car. They could get into serious trouble,” he said.
In July last year, an American woman was charged with murder after her two children died in a sweltering car while she went to a beauty salon.
The Detroit woman, Tarajee Maynor, left three-year-old Adonnis and 10-month-old Acacia in her black car for more than three hours on a day where temperatures of about 30 deg C were reached.
Salon staff said the woman had spent the time getting a massage, trying on a dress and having her hair relaxed, shampooed, trimmed and styled. Maynor said she had left a window slightly open and did not realise they would be in any danger.