Two kids left in car died from exposure
PHOENIX — Autopsies on two small Arizona children left strapped in car seats for hours in a closed vehicle have determined the infant girl and her toddler brother died from exposure, and they suffered no trauma and had no drugs in their bodies.
The reports by the Pinal County Medical Examiner’s Office say the March 26 deaths of two-year-old Lorenzo Velasquez and nine-month-old Brooklyn Velasquez in the isolated Arizona community of Superior were “consistent with exposure to the elements.”
The reports signed by Medical Examiner Dr. John Hu were released late Monday in response to a records request by the Associated Press.
The children’s 20-year-old mother, Brittany Velasquez, was arrested and charged in the deaths shortly after the bodies were discovered in the vehicle.
Authorities with the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office have said Velasquez was the last person to see her children alive when she left them in a car outside a family home on the morning of March 26 and went to work. The children were dead when Velasquez returned to the car nearly 14 hours later. They were still in the car seats and wearing the same clothes they had on in the morning.
The autopsies say sheriff’s officials reported Velasquez left the baby in a parked car “for a prolonged period of time” at least two times in the past.
Velasquez in April pleaded not guilty to two counts of seconddegree murder and child abuse charges in the deaths of her children in Superior, a hardscrabble mining town of 2,900 people about 100 kilometres east of Phoenix.
The vehicle was parked outside the home of relatives.
The National Weather Service says the temperature in Phoenix’s Valley of the Sun region reached nearly 24 C on March 26.
Velasquez initially had said someone else was supposed to be watching the children that day, but sheriff’s officials said there was no evidence of that.