911 refused to send help for 2-month-old trapped in hot car, mother says
Lucey Guyton accidentally locked her baby in her car but soon realized her mistake and dialed 911 while she tried breaking the passenger window.
Guyton, from Michigan, shared the details of the unfortunate incident, that occurred in Waterford, on August 18, 2018, on her Facebook page.
She explained how the 911 dispatcher refused to her help and she had to take matters into her own hands to save her two-month-old daughter, Raina.
Read more on our Twitter account @amomama_usa.
CBS News reported that the temperature on the day baby Raina got locked in the car, went up to 84 degrees and the temperature inside the vehicle could have been more than a 100 degrees.
Guyton placed her baby daughter in her seat, put in the diaper bag and closed the door. As she began walking to the driver's side, she heard the doors to her SUV get locked all of a sudden.
She realized that she had left the keys in her diaper bag. At the point, she asked her grandmother to contact 911 and began trying to smash the passenger window with a piece of asphalt found on the ground.
When her attempts to break the glass failed, Guyton's grandmother gave her a window breaker as well, but even that did not work.
All this while, Guyton's grandmother had been trying to get the call connected to a 911 operator, and when she finally did, the operator told her that they do not send a team of emergency responders to open car doors or break windows, despite there being a baby trapped inside the hot car.
The department instead asked the family to contact a tow company, and the distraught mother wrote that she had no time waiting for a tow truck to arrive because her baby was showing the effects of the high heat and had started to scream.
The mother, desperate to save her child, called 911 for the second time and requested for a fire rescue team. Her plea was again ignored, and she was asked to contact a tow company.
Guyton called a tow company and simultaneously carried on with her attempts to save Raina. She wrote that by that time the baby had stopped crying and her eyes were starting to close.
The worried mother could not figure out if Raina was becoming unconscious or falling asleep.
“Realizing no emergency help is coming to save my baby was the worst feeling in the world. I ran to the back windshield to try breaking that, and after two hard hits it finally shattered, and I’ve never felt more relieved,” she wrote in her post.
She then climbed in through the back and got Raina out by manually opening the door because her key was not working and the car doors wouldn't automatically unlock.
The tow company arrived about 12 minutes after she had rescued her baby and Guyton shared that if they had waited for the tow company's help, it would have been too late to save her daughter.
Waterford Police apologized to Guyton for the 911 dispatcher's negligence and assured her that the concerned person would be receiving more training.
In a related story, Officer Jason Short immediately responded to a 911 call on a hot day about a baby being locked in a car.
He rushed to the scene, broke the window and took the baby out only to realize that it was a doll and not a real baby.
The incident occurred at a Walmart parking lot in Keene, New Hampshire. When Short looked inside the car, he saw two small feet visible under a blanket covered over the car seat.
Thinking that it was a baby, Short instinctively smashed the window open and pulled the baby out of the heated vehicle.
The owner of the car, Carolynne Seiffert, was not happy when she learned about the incident. She was at the SuperCuts salon when Short was smashing open her car window.
The woman had purchased the doll, named Ainsley, for $2,300 to cope with the passing of her son and also mentioned that she owned 40 other dolls similar to Ainsley.
Even though Short seemed apologetic for what had happened, he stood by his actions. He didn't know that the baby was a doll and said that he would always assume that it was a child.
Another little girl was trapped inside a locked hot car, sweating profusely and the couple who came to rescue her found the baby's parents unconscious on the ground, overdosed on heroin.
Eric Asher, owner of a construction business, and his fiancée together saved the baby from inside the car.
The incident occurred in Canton, Ohio, and Asher posted the photos of the scene on his Facebook page, with the intention of creating awareness about the adverse effects of drugs.
The kind couple quickly pulled the baby out of the car and made her drink some water. They also contacted the emergency services, Inside Edition reported.