A
woman was supposed to drive a toddler to daycare. The child died
inside the hot van, cops say
Police have
arrested a South Miami-Dade woman who is accused of leaving a
toddler strapped in with a seat belt inside a sweltering van for
seven hours, killing the child.
Juana Perez-Domingo, 43,
was booked into a jail early Saturday on a charge of aggravated
manslaughter of a child.
According to the police report,
Perez-Domingo had been hired to ferry children to daycare in the
neighborhood. On Friday, she had been paid to take a 2-year-old
girl to a daycare in Homestead. She picked the child up about
6:30 a.m. and took the child to her own home first, because the
daycare had not opened yet.
Just before 8 a.m., she put
the toddler in the third row of her Toyota Sienna minivan —
without a child’s seat — to take her the daycare. The child was
strapped in with the seat belt. Perez-Domingo later admitted the
“got distracted” and went back inside her home, never turning
the van on, the report said.
As scorching temperatures
arrive with summer, it’s important to know the inside of a car
can climb to deadly temperatures in a matter of minutes. A
recent report concluded 52 children lost their lives in hot cars
in 2018 – a record number.
Temperatures in Homestead
reached the upper 80s on Friday.
Perez-Domingo went back
to the van about 3 p.m. and found the child. But instead of
calling 911, according to a police report by Miami-Dade
Detective Jonathan Grossman, she called the child’s mother and
“advised her that the victim had died.” Perez-Domingo then drove
the lifeless child to the mother’s house.
The woman had
no driver’s license, according to the arrest report. Her
transportation service appeared to be off the books. An autopsy
was scheduled for Saturday.
“Any time there’s a loss of a child, it’s just a very tragic event no
matter if it’s by natural means or by accident or by some other means,” he
said.