A 4-year-old Arizona girl died after being found unresponsive in a hot car on Sunday, police said.
According to the Buckeye Police Department, officers were called to a home near McDowell Road and Sienna Hills Parkway around 5 p.m. by a family member who found the victim in the car. Police attempted to revive her with CPR and an AED. Medics later took her to a hospital, where she was pronounced dead.
The family told police they returned from a park between 2 and 2:30 p.m. and believed everyone had entered the house. After not seeing the girl for several hours, they searched and found her in the car.
“This is not the outcome that anyone wants,” Carissa Planalp, a PIO with the Buckeye Police Department, said, 12 News reports. “We train for this regularly with our partners in the fire department. Unfortunately, in this situation, this little girl did not survive.”
According to the National Weather Service, temperatures at Buckeye Municipal Airport reached about 101 degrees Fahrenheit that day.
According to Jan Null, CCM, Adjunct Professor of Meteorology at San Jose State University, the child’s death marks the 31st pediatric vehicular heatstroke in the US this year.
“With an outside air temperature of approximately 104 degrees in Buckeye this afternoon, the interior temperature of the car could have been on the order of 150 degrees,” Null told CrimeOnline in an emailed statement. “Objects or a person inside the car in direct sunlight would have been significantly hotter.”
The investigation remains in its early stages, police added.
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[Feature Photo:Buckeye Police Department]
