ICE suspends vehicle stops after killing, FBI searches Lindsey Graham's house and another child dies in a hot car

**Christy Strawser** (0:00)
The day's biggest stories, the people behind the headlines, the conversations you won't hear anywhere else.
I'm Christy Strawser. You're listening to Audacy's On Deadline. We have a lot to dive into, but we'll kick things off with an urgent warning from WWL in New Orleans. Check your backseat every time you get out of the car, and never leave kids or pets or anything else you care about back there.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:24)
Three-year-old boy died after he was found inside a parked car with extremely high temperatures. According to the Ponchatoula Police Department, joining us now Chloe Burke, Data Manager with Kids in Car Safety. One is too many. I think this is the 12th to die in a hot car this year.

**Chloe Burke** (0:39)
Yes. Unfortunately, this is the 12th tragedy we've seen so far.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:42)
This child supposedly, I'm not trying to cast any aspersions, I'm just saying according to the police report, climbed into an unlocked car. Is that the way it usually generally works?

**Chloe Burke** (0:53)
So in every case we see children getting into the vehicle on their own is about 25 percent. Of the time, but an overwhelming majority, about 54 percent are when children are unknowingly left in the vehicle by a parent or a guardian.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:07)
How can that happen for people that don't understand? Because look, I've been doing this job a long time and we've had the conversation over and over and inevitably I get texts from people and they don't think that this can happen to them. But explain, if you will, some of the different scenarios under which people can leave a child in a car.

**Chloe Burke** (1:24)
Yeah, so it's incredibly complex for people to understand and people think like this would never happen to me, I would never leave my child inside the vehicle when really all of our cases mainly involve a loving responsible parent or caregiver who with the psychology behind these cases forget the child that was in the car in the first place. It's mainly the two parts of the brain, the hippocampus and the basal ganglia, where the here and now memory in your hippocampus where you might know you have to drive to the child's daycare. If there was a detour on the way to work or you got a phone call or these change in circumstance along with typically sleep deprivation in new parents can combine to make a catastrophic incident where they forget that the child's in the vehicle, they drive straight to work right past the daycare, thinking the entire time that they dropped the child off.
So, you know, that's where the autopilot part of the brain kicks in. And that's over half of the cases we see. And then again, 25% of the cases we see are with children getting into the vehicle on their own, which is relevant to what just happened recently.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:44)
And sometimes it can be a change in routine, right?

**Chloe Burke** (2:48)
Yes, definitely.
Typically, in most cases, we will see sleep deprivation or fatigue along with a change in routine. So, it's really important. And we like to tell people that if there's a change in routine, if maybe dad's driving the kids to daycare and he typically doesn't or vice versa, to be incredibly vigilant and make sure you're staying aware and conscious of the change in routine, just so that these incidents can't occur.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:17)
I bought a new truck last year, about a year ago today, as a matter of fact, and it has a warning to check the back seat. Is that the new technology in cars now? And I guess hopefully parents are paying attention to that. Maybe the numbers, what are the numbers showing? Are the number of deaths down?

**Chloe Burke** (3:34)
So with end of trip reminders, a lot of parents believe that these are based on weight detection where it recognizes that there's a child in the back seat. However, it's based on if the rear door was recently opened before the trip. If the rear door is opened within 10 minutes of the vehicle turning on, the end of trip reminder will be triggered at the end of the trip.
These fail though in situations where a parent might stop on the way of their trip to get gas, and they turn the vehicle off on that second ignition, there will no longer be that end of trip reminder because you didn't open the rear door while getting gas. And so far, Kids in Car Safety has collected the loss of 14 beautiful babies that had end of trip reminders in their vehicles.

**SPEAKER_2** (4:22)
Are the numbers coming down at all year to year, Chloe?