Cops: Toddler left in hot car

Mother faces charges after leaving child for hours while shopping

A Lauderhill woman is facing a child abuse charge after leaving her toddler in the back seat of a hot car while she went shopping for three hours on a summer afternoon in Fort Lauderdale.

Shantrell Mitchell, 32, told police that she forgot her daughter was in the vehicle’s backseat. But that didn’t square with the rest of the statement that she gave or with surveillance video showing her looking into the backseat of her four-door sedan.

According to an arrest report, Mitchell tried to cool the child down after she returned to her car after three hours to find her daughter suffering from heat exhaustion. “Mitchell described that she poured iced tea on the victim child’s head and also had her drink some,” the report states.

An employee at the BJ’s Wholsesale Club on 5100 North Powerline Road, where Mitchell shopped from about 12:36 p.m. to 3:38 p.m., called 911.

Paramedics recorded the girl’s body temperature at 105 degrees and said she was experiencing convulsions. She was first taken to Holy Cross Hospital, then to Joe Dimaggio Children’s Hospital in Hollywood, where her condition “drastically improved due to treatment,” according to the report.

The harrowing experience came less than two weeks after the body of Noah Sneed, 2, was found in a van outside a day care center in Oakland Park. That case is being investigated as an unintentional homicide.

According to the police report in Mitchell’s case, the mother had tried to get family members to look after her daughter on Tuesday afternoon, then drove to the market about 20 minutes from her home.

Police said that when she arrived, surveillance

footage showed her emerging from her car and opening the passenger door behind the driver’s seat, “where the child victim is seated.” Mitchell then locks the door, shuts it and walks away.

“Common sense — unreasonable to believe she would not have seen her child in the car seat while manually locking the side passenger door where the child was seated, said prosecutor Eric Linder.

Police described her action as “intentionally leasing the child victim in the locked vehicle.”

Wedneday’s high temperature in South Florida was in the low to mid 90s. Temperatures inside a closed vehicle could easily climb to over 152 degrees in minutes.

Mitchell has criminal record.

She’s charged with aggravated child abuse, a first-degree felony. Bond was set at $10,000. She remained in custody Friday evening. no prior