A father who left his three children, including a newborn and two toddlers, inside his car alone as he attended a funeral at a Baptist church in Charlotte, North Carolina, has been charged with child abuse causing serious injuries and two other misdemeanors after one of the children passed out while he was away.
The father, Jonathan Redfern, told WSOC-TV he left his 2-year-old son John, another 1-year-old and a 5-week-old inside his car earlier this month with the air conditioning on for a few minutes while he attended the funeral service of a late friend at the church in the Belmont neighborhood.
When he left the church to return to his car, he said a bystander informed him, “Your son is stuck in the window.”
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“Then it hit me — ‘oh snap.’ So I got in panic mode and ran to the car,” he recalled.
Redfern realized that John rolled the car window up on his neck and cut off his airway. The boy was eventually freed but stopped breathing. John was rushed to a local hospital, where he was revived.
Though Redfern claims he was only away from his car for a few minutes and asked someone to watch the children for him, court records indicate that he was recorded on surveillance cameras going into the church for the funeral and leaving some 15 minutes later.
He insists that he never meant any harm to his children.
“They mean everything,” he said, noting how lucky his son is to still be alive.
“Man, I’m grateful, brother, grateful,” Redfern added. “I never, never neglect my children or abuse my children.”
Redfern acknowledged that he should have left his child in a car seat, but statistics from NoHeatStroke.org show that about 1,000 children have died in hot cars since 1998.
More than half of these children were left behind unknowingly by their caregivers.
David Diamond, a professor of psychology at the University of South Florida in Tampa, told Consumer Reports that stresses parents face daily can cause memory lapses that cause them to forget their children are in the car.
“The most common response is that only bad or negligent parents forget kids in cars,” Diamond said. “It’s a matter of circumstances. It can happen to everyone.”
Janette Fennell, founder and president of KidsAndCars.org, which tracks such incidents, remarked to Consumer Reports that the “worst thing any parent or caregiver can ever do is to think that something like this could never happen to them or someone in their family.”
“We have to accept the fact that our brain multitasks. And as a part of that multitasking, the awareness of a child can be lost,” Diamond added. “We have to accept that the human memory is flawed. That includes when loving, attentive parents lose awareness of their children when they are in a car.”
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