A woman was arrested this week in the death of her 5-year-old foster son after he was found unresponsive in a hot car in Omaha, Nebraska. Omaha police said Juanita Pinon, 40, was charged with one count of child abuse by neglect, resulting in death, after the boy was discovered inside the vehicle just after 5 p.m.
local time Wednesday. The car had been in a parking lot outside of the beauty salon where Pinon works, police spokesman Chris Gordon told NBC News, adding that the child had been left unattended in the car for approximately 7 hours while Pinon was working. He was rushed to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead, police said.
Pinon did not answer questions from police about whether she knowingly left the boy in the car or whether it was accidental, Gordon said. The Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees foster care, did not immediately respond to an inquiry about Pinon’s history as a foster mother. She is currently being held by the Douglas County Department of Corrections.
A postmortem exam was being conducted to determine whether the boy died of heat exposure or from another cause, Gordon said Friday. If he died from the heat, that would make him at least the 10th child to die in a hot car in 2024, according to , a nonprofit group dedicated to saving the lives of children in and around vehicles. In Omaha on Wednesday, the temperature hit 89 degrees F.
But the temperature inside cars can be much hotter than outside, said Janette Fennell,.