Two months after a 5-year-old Mansfield boy died of heat stroke when he was left in a hot car, Richland County is offering free car seat sensors to prevent additional deaths.
The sensors will send an alert to remind parents after they get out of their car to check whether they left a pet or child behind. If they don’t respond, emergency contacts are called.
The campaign is in response to the death of Kyrie Brown, who died after being accidentally left in his mothers’ car, Richland Public Health Commissioner Julie Chaya said.
"After [that], I thought to myself, 'There's no way we can just keep carrying on in life with putting out a Facebook post or just a basic prayer or a remembrance,'" she told Ideastream Public Media. "We had to do something more."
According to noheatstroke.org, a research website focused on preventing pediatric vehicular heatstroke deaths, more than half of all pediatric deaths from heatstroke were because parents forgot their children in the car.
The seat sensors will send an alert to parents if there's an indication a pet or child may have been left behind. If that text is not answered within a minute, the device will follow up with a phone call. If the call is not answered, the device will send an alert to the parent's emergency contacts.
The department is also offering reminder wrist bands to wear while driving with a child and window clings with thermometers to prompt drivers to check the backseat of their vehicles.
Reminders can save lives, said Mansfield Mayor Jodie Perry.
“This can happen to anybody," Perry said. "We all get busy, and so anything we can do to help us remember is important. One life saved is enough to make it worthwhile.”
Getting the child out of the car quickly is essential because temperatures rise so rapidly, Chaya said.
“On a 90-degree day, the inside of a car can reach to well over 130 degrees," she said. "You can bake something at that temperature. Even at a 70-degree Fahrenheit day, a car's interior can exceed over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in just 20 minutes.”
Published research by Jan Null, a research meteorologist at San Jose State University, and founder of noheatstroke.org, reached the same conclusions.
Younger children are especially at risk of heat stroke as their body heat can rise three to five times as quickly as an adult's, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Twenty-three children ages 14 and under died in Ohio between 1990 and 2024 from heat stroke, which can quickly damage the brain, heart, kidneys and muscles and lead to death.
An average of 38 children die each year from heatstroke — most after being left in a vehicle.
