Montreal police say they are not currently treating the death of a six-month-old boy as a crime after the father found his infant son’s lifeless body in the back seat of his vehicle.
The parents will be questioned in the coming days, police say, and the results of an autopsy will be available next week.
At approximately 5:30 p.m. Friday, the child’s father made the heartbreaking discovery after showing up at a daycare to pick up his son.
Montreal police spokesperson Jean-Pierre Brabant said daycare staff told the father that they hadn’t seen the boy that day.
“So his first reaction was to go see in the vehicle, and from there saw that his child was inside the vehicle, unconscious,” Brabant told CTV Montreal.
Paramedics tried to resuscitate the child, but he was declared dead at the scene. According to police, the child’s parents were transported to hospital in a state of nervous shock.
Temperatures in Montreal on the day of the incident peaked at nearly 25 degrees Celsius, Environment Canada data shows.
In Canada, similar cases have been treated very differently in the past.
In 2016, Quebec prosecutors opted not to charge a father in a similar incident in the nearby town of Saint-Jerome. Like the Montreal man, this father only realized that he had forgotten his child in his vehicle after it was too late.
An Ontario father is due in court next week to face charges criminal negligence causing death and failing to provide the necessaries of life after his three-year-old died after being forgotten in a vehicle in Burlington in May. The child died of hyperthermia, or an elevated body temperature.
From a legal perspective, the decision to lay criminal charges depends on whether or not someone can be held responsible for wrong behavior, or blameworthiness, says Montreal-based criminal lawyer Andrew Barbacki.
“So somebody making a mistake, somebody who hasn’t really consciously done anything wrong, it’s difficult to say that the person merits punishment,” Barbacki said.
Child safety advocates say young children are more susceptible to heatstroke, a form of hyperthermia, because their core temperatures can rise three to five times faster than adults.
Although there are no statistics available for Canada, the National Safety Council, an American non-profit, says an average of 37 children die each year in hot cars in the U.S.
Pamela Fueslli of Parachute Canada, a charity that works to prevent serious and fatal injuries, says there are some simple things parents can do to avoid such tragedies.
“(Put) something in the backseat that you have to get before you get out of the car: your briefcase, your cellphone, your purse,” she told CTV Montreal. “Something that makes you look in the backseat.”
With a report from CTV Montreal’s Kelly Greig
