I don't understand how this can happen

The summer heat continues although, today, for the first time in about 6 weeks, it is actually cloudy, raining and a bit cooler. We had some rain yesterday, not enough to even completely dampen the sidewalk, but enough to pop the humidity right back up to saturation point.

After this long a prolonged heat wave, and with all of the publicity about hydration, stay out of the direct sun, and don't leave anything that you don't want cooked, in a car in a parking lot, you would think that people would be getting the hang of it. Unfortunately in the last 36 hours two young children have been found dead after having been left in locked cars outside in the heat and sun for up to 9 hours.

In the first case, a grandmother picked up her 3 year old grandson to drop him off at day care. Somehow between point A and B, she forgot that she had the child in the car, drove off to do errands at the mall and came back three hours later to find the infant in the car. He died at the hospital 6 hours later.

In the second case, the mother put the 5 year old boy in his car seat, meaning to drop him off at day care while she went to work at the local hospital. She got to work at 6:30 AM, parked in the employee section of the lot, and went into the hospital to work her 9 hour shift. At the end of her shift she came out, saw the boy unconscious on the front seat where he had tried to put a key into the ignition after escaping from his car seat presumably being coherent enough at that point to try and turn on the engine/ac or unlock the doors and get out. The mother rushed her child back into the ER but the ER staff was unable to revive him and he was pronounced DOA at the scene.

It is a terrible tragedy for both women, but as both a concerned intelligent adult and as a mother, I have to ask myself, how do you, as a parent or grandparent "forget" that you have a child with you? Unless the children were drugged or comatose, they were presumably alive and interacting with the adult. Even if they were asleep, both adults went through the routine of putting them onto their daily schedule to be picked up and dropped off somewhere, as well as assuring their safety by putting them into a car seat while driving them to drop off.

While a momentary lapse, to the point of starting to close the car door and then remembering with a jerk, under stressful or harried circumstances might be understandable, albeit no less forgiveable, but how do you forget a child you have assumed responsibility for any length of time, much less three hours or nine and one half hours. As the saying goes, " it does not compute."

I guess it speaks to the " all about me and only me" attitude that seems to prevail in a lot of people these days, that not even a presumably intelligent and reasoning adult can be expected to fully acknowledge the existence of a dependent child in their daily moment to moment life. Nor can they be expected to do something as simple as check into the car as they leave it, just to make sure they haven't forgotten anything.

Presumably both women were intelligent and responsible enough to be driving a car and or holding down a job, but neither one looked back into the car long enough to register that there was still a child in there? Or if they did, did they think that the child could survive waiting in the car in the heat, until it was convenient for them to remember that the child was there and do something about it?

The worst part about it all is that members of the justice system here in Texas are almost shrugging they're shoulders and saying "why charge them with anything, there is nothing worse we can do to them." No, there is nothing you can do except make them learn from their mistake by at least standing up in public and acknowledging it in a court of law, and doing some sort of penance, even if it just a public confession of guilt and contrition and a vow to do better.

Yes, I guess it is a tragedy for the mother and grandmother in that they were each fully responsible for the death of a dependent child. It is however, a much greater tragedy that each child had the misfortune through no choice of their own, to be dependent on an irresponsible adult family member.