Mom didn’t call 911 when baby died, police say
A Fort Lauderdale woman didn’t call 911 when she came to the horrific realization that she left her baby boy strapped in his car seat all day while she was at work, police say.
And she drove 2 miles with the baby unresponsive in his child seat, apparently without realizing he was there.
Eli Bird, 17 months old, died from overheating, with his body temperature rising to 108 degrees.
Emily Bird clocked out of work on July 13, a Friday afternoon, and drove to pick up Eli from day care. But when day care workers told her Eli wasn’t there — that she never dropped him off — she stayed calm and didn’t tell them she needed help.
By then, she had realized she had left her son for hours in the hot minivan, but “failed to alert the staff or call 911,” according to a newly released police report.
After the day care workers told the mom she never dropped off her son, Bird walked to his cubbyhole to retrieve his blanket and other belongings. She calmly walked out of the day care building. She got in her minivan and sat there for several minutes, but told police she couldn’t bear to check on Eli in his child seat even though she knew he was there.
It’s unclear exactly when Bird figured out the tragedy that befell her son. In a police report recently obtained by the South Florida Sun Sentinel, an investigator said her minivan’s rearview mirror, as well as a child safety mirror, “were positioned in such a way that one could not miss seeing the victim’s car seat from the driver’s seat.”
The report details how investigators obtained surveillance video, phone records and other evidence to show how the mom was allegedly negligent that day.
Bird told police she had been extremely exhausted from staying up late the night before, because her home was being fumigated and she had to sleep overnight at a friend’s house.
She woke up about 6:45 a.m. and was supposed to drop off Eli at the day care, but instead she drove directly to an outpatient center in Pembroke Pines, where she works as a health coach, police said.
While on her way to work, she was on a phone call that would last 43 minutes, police said. She clocked in to work at 8:15 a.m., and she still was on the phone.
Bird had left the boy inside her black Honda Odyssey minivan, parked near the office building, police said. The minivan was turned off, with no air conditioning and the windows up.
Eight and a half hours went by. She clocked out of work at 4:40 p.m. and drove to the day care center. As she left work at 4:44 p.m., her phone records showed seven calls that were either made or received by her.
After she walked in and out of the day care, she drove back to her workplace, police said. Between the time she left the day care and returned to work, she phoned her husband’s number four times. A police report doesn’t specify whether she managed to reach him.
Bird grabbed her son from the minivan and took him inside a lobby, where a co-worker and two doctors stepped in to try to help the unresponsive boy. A doctor phoned 911.
“The child is blue. The child is not breathing,” the doctor told a dispatcher. “The mother just walked in with the child. I don’t know what happened.”
At some point, the mom screamed, saying “I left him in the car. … How did this happen?”
On Oct. 3, Bird turned herself in to police to face the charge of aggravated manslaughter of a child.
Her lawyer, Lawrence Hashish, declined to comment late Wednesday about the arrest report. He has previously said his client is distraught at what unfolded and that “no one can imagine the pain she is enduring unless they have lost a child.”
Dara Bushman, a clinical psychologist in Pembroke Pines, said that everyone can respond differently to a traumatic event, even a mom who just realized her son died.
“There’s no specific way in which one would respond to trauma,” said Bushman, who isn’t involved in the case. “Anything is possible when it comes to trauma.”
As a mother of two kids, ages 3 and 5, Bushman said she couldn’t picture herself staying calm through such an ordeal. “I can’t imagine having a delayed response,” she said.