Couple on a mission
Dills working to raise awareness after son, left in hot car, dies
EVANSVILLE, Ind. — Andrew and Jamie Dill want to make sure other families never have to experience what they went through almost two years ago.
Their 3-year-old son Oliver, also known as “Ollie,” died after being forgotten in a car on the University of Southern Indiana campus in 2019.
Now the Dills are working locally and with national advocacy groups to raise awareness around hot car deaths and ways to prevent them.
Andrew and Jamie recently went public with a nonprofit organization called Be Kind For Ollie, which they established to educate the public about the dangers of leaving children and pets in vehicles.
“We didn’t want his death to be in vain,” Jamie said. “We wanted to do something for others. We didn’t want this to happen again. Unfortunately, it does, but we want to prevent as many deaths as possible.”
On July 9, 2019, Andrew drove Ollie to the University of Southern Indiana, where Andrew worked and Ollie attended the Children’s Learning Center. Jamie stayed home to prepare for an upcoming family vacation.
Andrew had taken Ollie to day care before, and the couple planned to take their two sons to see a movie that afternoon ahead of their trip.
“I thought I had dropped him off and went about my day,” he said.
When it was time to leave for the movie, Andrew went first to his car to adjust Ollie’s car seat straps and make it easier to get him settled.
“When I opened the door, that’s when I saw him and I just scooped him up” and ran to the CLC, where employees called paramedics, Andrew said.
Jamie had called minutes before to remind Andrew about the movie and mentioned over the phone that the day care app did not show Ollie had checked in that morning. That wasn’t out of the ordinary; the iPad parents used for check-in often glitched, the Dills said.
A portion of the Dills’ work through Be Kind For Ollie is advocating for and working with child care centers to implement protocols that would prevent miscommunication.
Jamie has begun meeting with local facilities to encourage them to establish policies requiring employees to contact caregivers if they aren’t dropped off by a certain time — that could be with a phone call or an automated notification through apps, which many centers already use, she said.
“We’re trying to have the app have an add-on software where it’ll automatically send out a message to the parents if they’re not dropped off by a certain time or by their usual time,” Jamie said.
The Dills and other organizations they work with outline several methods to help prevent memory lapses, such as putting something essential for your day in the backseat, like a purse or laptop.
“We were out of our routine that day, which is one of the dangerous aspects of hot car deaths,” Jamie said.
Other strategies include making a habit of partners calling or texting each other when they drop their child off, or always checking the backseat before locking the car, no matter where you’re going or if you have your child with you.
Ollie — who would have turned 5 years old on June 2 — is one of 16 Indiana children younger than 14 who died in hot cars between 1990 and 2020.
“We didn’t want his death to be in vain. We wanted to do something for others. We didn’t want this to happen again. Unfortunately, it does, but we want to prevent as many deaths as possible.” — Jamie Dill
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 883 children have died in hot cars since 1998. Going back to 1990, that number nears 1,000, with 993 children under 14 dead from being forgetting in hot cars.
While there was a decrease in 2020 (24 deaths) from previous years, likely because of the pandemic, 2018 and 2019 saw record-breaking numbers of child deaths: 54 and 53, respectively, according to KidsAndCars.org.
“It’s a problem that seems to be increasing,” Andrew said.
One way the Dills work to prevent future hot car deaths is by championing legislation such as the Hot Cars Act, which would require car manufacturers to incorporate technology that would detect and alert others to the presence of people or pets left in vehicles.
The Dills have joined forces with KidsAndCars.org, a national nonprofit organization that aims to cut down on vehicle-related deaths among children and pets, including but not limited to heatstroke deaths.
“They’ve been really supportive,” Andrew said. “Whenever the accident happened with Ollie, that organization was one of the first to reach out and give us resources, put us into contact with other families that had experienced this. They’ve just always been there.”
Andrew and Jamie were among those who spoke during a virtual press conference to announce the reintroduction of the Hot Cars Act in the House of Representatives last month.
They have been advocating for the bill and encouraging others to contact their representatives in Congress regarding the bill.
Indiana Rep. Larry Bucshon was one of dozens to sign on to cosponsor a previous version of the bill introduced in 2019. He issued the following statement to the Courier & Press about the latest version of the Hot Cars Act:
“It is families like the Dill family who have turned their tragedy into action, heartbreak into activism, and are using their experience to create real change. It is their voice, among others who have helped spur legislation like the Hot Cars Act and continue to raise awareness for this important cause,”
Bucshon said. “While I was a cosponsor of this bill last Congress and will likely cosponsor again this Congress, I am still reviewing and evaluating the changes made to the bill that was recently introduced.”
Another aspect of the Dills’ local efforts are the “little libraries” they have set up in parks and cemeteries around Evansville. The books are donated or purchased with donated funds; Andrew and Jamie said they have received support from friends and family, but also strangers from far and wide through Be Kind For Ollie.
The libraries in cemeteries primarily house grief-based books.
“I wanted to help grieving parents, mainly,” Jamie said. “And I thought a lot of grieving parents don’t want to go to grief support groups, and they don’t necessarily want to go anywhere those early weeks, except for maybe the cemetery. And we thought putting some grief books at the cemetery for those parents to utilize, or anyone to utilize, would kind of help the community.”
For anyone who comes across the libraries, the Dills say there is no hard-and-fast rule around them. Hopefully, Jamie said, people will bring them back or leave other books for people to enjoy, but she understands why people may not do that every time.
“Through my own experience, I’ve found that when I connect with a grief book, I don’t want to let it go because I can refer back to it,” she said. “So I don’t expect books to be returned. But if they are, then that’s great, or if they want to leave one that’s fine as well.”
The Dills feel strongly that education about how to prevent hot car deaths goes hand-in-hand with policies and legislation that can help prevent them in the future — hence, their advocacy for steps like the Hot Cars Act nationally and facility-specific protocols as a safeguard.
“What we see, especially with the increase in deaths, is that public awareness and education isn’t enough,” Andrew said.
“You can’t assume that this wouldn’t happen to you, because if you look at the demographics of who this has happened to, there’s no one characteristic that stands out,” Andrew said.