What you probably didn't know is that this month, July, is the most dangerous time of the year. You probably also didn't know that this type of death can occour on relatively mild days. The details are horrific for any parent to imagine; a rapidly rising temperature that reaches an unlivable level in only a few short minutes. The child is either restrained or does not understand how to properly operate the door handle. It is tragic.

The circumstances of these deaths are not widely known; which, in turn, means parents are ill-equipped for prevention. A few months ago there was a spat of articles and blog posts concerning whether it is okay to leave your child in the car for the few minutes in order to run a quick errand such as grabbing a gallon of milk. Commonly there are not negative repercussions for such a decision. However, sometimes authorities are called and some type of legal ordeal ensues. Finally, a much worse alternative occurs: The child dies. However, the typical conditions for such a death are not well known.

As I became curious about this question, I turned to common and publicly available data sources related to general health but was disappointed to find nothing. What I did find is a large amount of resources developed by volunteers. There is a small campaign by the Department of National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration (NHTSA) but no raw data was offered, only summary statistics. After a small amount of digging on the topic I ran across the website of Jan Null, a meteorologist at San Jose State.

Jan probably deserves an award for what he has done concerning the data of heatstroke deaths. A few years ago, he observed that there was not a reliable source of data for these types of deaths. So he developed his own database. When a death occurs, he scours public records and reports and then extracts as many as 25 different pieces of information about the event. His effort has resulted in the most comprehensive and reliable dataset related to heatstroke deaths of children in vehicles. In a strange twist of priority the NHTSA (and seemingly everyone else interested in the topic) now uses his data as the authoritative information source.

Upon request, Jan allowed me to use his hard earned data to write this article. With a rich source of information about these deaths, we can explore the sets of conditions that lead to these very preventable incidences.

I will walk through the data on three levels; circumstance, location and time. The first consideration of interest is how the child got into the vehicle in the first place. The following pie chart shows the distribution.