Mom Forced To Rescue Baby Locked in Hot Car by Herself When 911 Doesn't Show Up
It’s a message pounded into the heads of parents and caregivers nationwide: never leave a child alone in a car.
The message comes for good reason — every summer, children lose their lives after being locked unattended inside a hot vehicle, where temperatures can quickly rise to well over 100 degrees or more.
So when a Michigan police dispatcher told worried mother Lacey Guyton that the police department wasn’t responsible for helping her baby who had been left inside the car, Guyton was devastated.
“It was terrifying,” Guyton told WABC-TV. “It was like the worst day of my life.”
While we often hear stories about parents forgetting that their child is still inside the car, 2-month-old Raina never left her mother’s sight.
Guyton explained how Raina ended up in the car with the doors locked:
“The keys are in my diaper bag,” she said. “I put the diaper bag in the car, put Raina in the car, and then shut the door. And then all of a sudden, it locks.”
Realizing she had just locked Raina inside the car with no air conditioning, Guyton did what any responsible parent would do — she tried to break her vehicle’s window while her grandmother called 911.
The dispatcher’s response left Guyton horrified.
“‘We don’t send people out to unlock cars or break windows,'” the dispatcher told Guyton’s grandmother. What she could do, however, was connect Guyton to a tow company.
“I was so shocked, and like, OK, they’re not coming,” an emotional Guyton recalled.
Guyton said her baby girl went from crying incessantly to closing her eyes, and Guyton knew that saving her daughter was up to her. She was able to find her grandfather’s window breaker tool, and smashed the rear window herself.
Her baby was drenched in sweat, Guyton said, feeling terrible that Raina had to suffer.
“After calling twice, the dispatcher, who’s a veteran dispatcher, still didn’t send somebody out,” Guyton said. “It’s heartbreaking.”
Guyton said she has since received an apology from the Waterford police, who said they normally do not respond when people lock their keys in their car — but in this case, they should have.
“It’s a common sense issue,” Waterford Police Chief Scott Underwood said. “You call 911, you expect for somebody to come and give you some help.”
“And we certainly should have gone and done that,” Underwood said. “We made a mistake, and we didn’t. And we need to fix that.”
Guyton said she does appreciate the apology, but remains frustrated that her situation was so grossly mishandled.
“If there’s a mom begging you to come save her daughter’s life, you send somebody,” Guyton said.
She added that she hopes the situation never happens to anybody else, and that she’s ultimately just glad that her daughter is OK.
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