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Are poor, Black parents more likely to face charges when kids die in hot cars? One group is trying to find an answer

When a child dies in a hot car, what factors should prosecutors weigh when deciding on charges? Advocates are looking at what charged parents have in common, including race and socioeconomic status.

Amanda Lee Myers   | Paste BN
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In an upscale Houston neighborhood in June, one mother accidentally left her 5-year-old son in the car as she was trying to throw her 8-year-old daughter the perfect birthday. Thinking he had climbed out on his own, she didn’t notice he was missing until it was too late. He died within hours.

Just 700 miles to the east in Tallahassee a month later, another mother was working her job at a hospice facility. She thought she had dropped her 11-month-old baby boy off at daycare before work but he was still in the back seat of her car, dying of heat stroke as she worked on a photo collage of him for his upcoming first birthday.

In both cases, two loving mothers made the worst mistake of their lives. One was arrested and charged with felony aggravated manslaughter. The other was not.

The differing treatment of the two grief-stricken women illustrates just how arbitrary the prosecution of such cases is in the U.S. and raises concerns over disparities in the race and socioeconomic status of those who are punished. The Houston mother is white, the Tallahassee mom Black.

“There are definitely disparities, seemingly both racial and socioeconomic,” said Amber Rollins, director of Kids and Car Safety, a group that tracks the crisis and tries to educate the public about it.

She cited another recent case in which a white Louisiana mother who was moving out of a trailer park accidentally left her baby boy in the car, which killed him.

“She's been charged and I looked up the previous cases in her jurisdiction,” Rollins said. “All of them were professionals, higher socioeconomic status and none of them faced charges. It makes no sense at all.”

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For the first time ever, Rollins' group is working to quantify the disparities by documenting the demographics of the 1,000-plus hot car deaths in the U.S. since 1990. 

“I am certain this will be very revealing of our criminal justice system,” Rollins said, adding that the work is expected to take at least six more months. 

Of at least 19 confirmed hot car deaths so far this year, four parents of color have been charged while no white parent has. A Paste BN analysis of nearly 180 hot car deaths in the past five years found that at least 36 people of color were charged and 35 white people were. 

Socioeconomic status is much harder to measure. Police often release very little information about the parents of children who die in hot cars, especially if they decide not to arrest them. 

Although the raw numbers are about equal, the U.S. is 58 percent white, and people of color are less likely to own vehicles.  

Anecdotally, Rollins and her colleagues have noticed that parents with lower incomes are more likely to face consequences.

"If Mom lives in a trailer park she's probably more likely to be charged than if she lives in a million-dollar home," Rollins said. "Maybe that's because the mom in the trailer park didn't have an attorney show up at the station before she did or maybe it's just because she lived in a trailer park."

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For years, the prosecution of such cases has been a patchwork and seemingly dependent on both the officers who arrive to the scene and the prosecutors considering the cases. 

The National District Attorneys Association has never issued guidance for its members about how to handle such cases and has no plans to, said John Flynn, the president of the organization and the district attorney in Erie County, New York.

"These are all going to be specific, fact-by-fact analyses," he said. "There's no federal law that's going to govern the entire country. So you're dealing literally with 50 separate state homicide statutes."

Personally, he said he would never charge a hot car death case if it were completely accidental, as most cases are.

"As a district attorney, I have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the parents' actions here were reckless," he said. "If the parent just forgot and didn't realize that the person was there, that's going to be tough proving that case."

While more than 70 parents have been charged in hot car deaths in the past five years, it's more difficult to say how many have been convicted. Prosecutors who put out press releases when they charged a parent can just as easily drop them without notifying the public. Many cases simply fade away.

Of the 170 deaths in the past five years, Kids and Cars has only been able to confirm 19 convictions, Rollins said, though many from 2021 and this summer are still ongoing.

"But even if they aren't convicted, it still ruins their lives, reputations, careers, friendships, etcetera," she said. "The ripple effect is hard to quantify."

Disparities in the prosecution of hot car deaths reflect the criminal justice system in the U.S. as a whole, which tends to punish the poor and the non-white at a much higher rate, said Bennett Capers, a law professor and the director of the Center on Race, Law & Justice at Fordham University School of Law.

Capers, also a former federal prosecutor, looked into hot car deaths years ago for a class he was teaching and quickly drew one conclusion about how it's punished:

"It's completely random," he said. "You have identical facts, different results ... A lot of circumstances, it seems to turn on just how sympathetic that police officer finds the parent and how sympathetic the prosecutor finds this parent.

"So whenever you have little things like that, where how somebody comes out involves a lot of discretion, then you're likely to see these sort of imbalances," he said. 

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