WICHITA, Kan. (AP) – A 10-month-old Kansas girl died after being strapped for more than two hours inside a sweltering car, and police arrested a foster parent who said he’d forgotten about her until something on TV jogged his memory, an official said Friday.
The 29-year-old man was booked on suspicion of aggravated endangerment but has not been charged, said Lt. Todd Ojile of the Wichita Police Department. The case will be presented early next week to prosecutors.
The girl’s distraught maternal grandmother, Cindy Poe of Topeka, Kansas, went to police headquarters Friday demanding to see her granddaughter’s body and to find out where her other two grandchildren had been taken.
“I want answers,” Poe told The Associated Press. “I want to know why my grandbaby was in that car.”
The investigation found that the girl was picked up from the baby sitter at around 4 p.m. Thursday and brought home, where she was “somehow forgotten” in the back seat of the car in Wichita, where temperatures were around 90 degrees. The foster parent went inside the house with a 5-year-old child that had also been with him, but left the baby strapped in the car seat in the parked car outside the house.