Moshe Ehrlich, Lakewood, N.J dad leaves 4 month old son in hot car for ‘extended time’ only to be charged with endangering the welfare of a child and escaping graver consequences unlike a Martha’s Vineyard babysitter who also left a 2 year old boy in an un-attended car for 3 hours amid ‘cold temperatures’ being charged with manslaughter.
A New Jersey father has been charged with the hot car death of his 4 month old son after the boy being left in a minivan for an ‘extended time’.
Moshe Ehrlich, 35, of Lakewood, N.J according to a press release by the Ocean County Prosecutor Bradley D. Billhimer was on Thursday charged with endangering the welfare of a child.
Hot min-van car death that could’ve been averted?
According to the prosecutor, officers from the Lakewood Township Police Department were dispatched to a residential home in Lakewood, around 1:45 p.m. on Tuesday, March 18, after receiving a report about ‘an infant inside a motor vehicle in distress.’
When police arrived, personnel from a local volunteer medic group, Hatzolah Medical Services were administering ‘lifesaving aid’ to Ehrlich’s 4-month-old son. The infant was transported to Monmouth Medical Center Southern Campus, where he was pronounced dead, the release stated.
Although AccuWeather reports that Lakewood reached a high of only 62 degrees at the time of the incident, it’s common for car temperatures to rise by more than 10 to 20 degrees in the span of just minutes, creating a dangerous environment for children left alone.
A follow up investigation by police and the prosecutor’s office determined that the infant baby — whose name has not been made public — had been left alone in Ehrlich’s car for ‘an extended period of time.’
Prosecutors didn’t provide the exact time the boy was left un-attended in the vehicle nor how the boy came to be left in the car. And whether as some commentators on the internet wondered, had habitually left the boy in the van as a kind of ‘daycare.’
Both children dead as a consequence of being left unattended for extended periods in vehicles, but different punishments
Also not immediately clear is how prosecutors determined Ehrlich only be charged with child endangerment and not the more onerous crime of manslaughter as was Massachusetts woman Aimee Cotton, 41, who was booked on Wednesday after the baby sitter leaving an unattended 2 year old boy in a car outside a Martha’s Vineyard residence also for an ‘extended’ period of time late last week only for that child to also die.
Cotton during questioning told investigators she had only left the 2 year old along with the boy’s 1 year old sister for only 15 minutes in her vehicle. Investigators reviewing a Nest camera determined that the children had been left unattended for 3 hours, CBS News reported.
A prosecutor said the boy suffered from hypothermia (unlike hyperthermia, which is when one’s internal body temperature is higher than normal and the result of prolonged exposure to heat or hot weather) and his body temperature was 14 degrees lower than normal upon arrival at the hospital.
Ehrlich turned himself in at the Lakewood Township Police headquarters and was taken to the Ocean County Jail after his March 20 indictment and released by a judge hours later.
According to court records obtained by PEOPLE, Ehrlich is next due in court on April 28.
NoHeatStroke.org, an organization that studies vehicular heatstroke deaths, has reported that around 37 children under the age of 14 die from being left in a hot car each year.
In most cases, a child is left in the car unintentionally. Parents or caregivers change their routine — maybe a mom takes the child to daycare instead of the dad — and forget that their child is in the back seat.
