MIAMI — Police have arrested a South Miami-Dade woman who is accused of leaving a toddler strapped in with a seat belt inside a sweltering van for seven hours, killing the child.
Juana Perez-Domingo, 43, was booked into a jail early Saturday on a charge of aggravated manslaughter of a child.
According to the police report, Perez-Domingo had been hired to ferry children to daycare in the neighborhood. On Friday, she had been paid to take a 2-year-old girl to a daycare in Homestead. She picked the child up about 6:30 a.m. and took the child to her own home first, because the daycare had not opened yet.
Just before 8 a.m., she put the toddler, who has been identified as Joceyln Maritza Mendez, in the third row of her Toyota Sienna minivan — without a child’s seat — to take her to the daycare. The child was strapped in with the seat belt. Perez-Domingo later admitted she “got distracted” and went back inside her home, never turning the van on, the report said.
Temperatures in Homestead reached the upper 80s on Friday.
Perez-Domingo went back to the van about 3 p.m. and found the child. But instead of calling 911, according to a police report by Miami-Dade Detective Jonathan Grossman, she called the child’s mother and “advised her that the victim had died.” Perez-Domingo then drove the lifeless child to the mother’s house.
The woman had no driver’s license, according to the arrest report. Her transportation service appeared to be off the books. An autopsy was scheduled for Saturday.
The child is the second to die in a hot car in Florida this year, according the organization Kids and Car Safety, which has pushed for national legislation requiring all new passenger motor vehicles to be equipped with a child safety alert system that would “detect the presence of a child who is unable to exit a vehicle or has entered an unattended vehicle independently.”
“Over 1,000 U.S. children have died in hot cars since 1990 which underscores the importance of adding detection technology to vehicles to end these predictable and preventable tragedies. Every day that we delay in advancing these cost-effective detection technologies mean children are at risk of needlessly dying,” according to the release by the organization’s president, Janette Fennell.
