A 14-month-old baby was found dead in a parking lot on Wednesday in Bordes, near Pau (Pyrénées-Atlantiques), report RTL and Sud-Ouest. The infant had been forgotten by his father in the vehicle.
The father of the child, an employee of the aeronautical company Safran, would have forgotten to drop off his baby at the nursery in the morning, before going to work. “The first investigations suggest that the young child died of suffocation and dehydration,” said the public prosecutor of Pau, Cécile Gensac, in a press release.
The mother, noting the absence of her child on Wednesday at the end of the day at the crèche in Assat, a peripheral town of Pau and not far from the father’s workplace, had given the alert.
Resuscitation attempts by firefighters and a Samu team, immediately transported to the scene, around 5 p.m., proved futile. “No one had heard the slightest noise, the car park being extensive,” said the prosecutor of Pau.
Two open psychological cells
A flagrant investigation for manslaughter was opened and entrusted to the Pau-Lescar research brigade. The parents of the baby, “without criminal record and parents of an older child”, were transferred in a state of shock to the hospital center of Pau. “No hearing could be carried out as it stands,” said Cécile Gensac. An autopsy is scheduled for Friday to determine the exact cause of death.
The Safran company warned its employees via an internal press release, according to Sud-Ouest, which specifies that a psychological unit has been opened within the company as well as at the Assat crèche. The childcare establishment will remain closed until the end of the week. The other children were redirected to inter-municipal structures in the surrounding area, “and psychological cells were also opened there for the parents”, specified the mayor of Assat.
This is not the first time that an infant has died left behind in his parents’ vehicle. In June, a caregiver at Saint-Nazaire hospital forgot to drop off his 14-month-old son at the crèche and had left him in his car before he took up his post.
Stuck in the vehicle where the heat quickly rose, the child then lost his life, probably from dehydration and hyperthermia, two particularly dangerous phenomena for a child under two years old.