A father has been arrested after the deaths of 15-month-old twin girls found in a hot auto outside Atlanta, Georgia.
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Asa North, 24, also faces reckless conduct charges in Carrollton, Ga., police said. It is unclear how long the girls had been strapped into the back seat of the Nissan SUV before being found.
Asa North, 24, left twin daughters Ariel Roxanne and Alynah Maryanne in a auto “for a period of time”, according to Carrollton police Captain Chris Dobbs.
Bystanders tried to cool the unresponsive infants in a pool before paramedics rushed them to a hospital, where they were pronounced dead, the newspaper said. Post-mortems have yet to be carried out.
The girl’s mother was at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta at the time, visiting her sister, who had been in a serious vehicle crash on Wednesday, Capt Dobbs said.
It wasn’t immediately clear whether North has an lawyer who could be contacted for comment. They do not believe he left his daughters in the auto intentionally, but they believe he was drinking alcohol as his daughters died in the hot vehicle. “He should have took care of them kids better than that, what he did”.
So far this year, at least 24 children in the United States have died as a result of hot cars, according to the national safety advocacy organization KidsAndCars.
The high temperature on Thursday in Carrollton was 87 degrees, but it doesn’t have to reach unsafe levels outside to become a threat to people and animals left in a vehicle.
CARROLLTON, Ga. (AP) Police charged a father with manslaughter Friday in the deaths of his 15-month-old twin girls, alleging that he had been drinking before leaving them in their vehicle seats in 90-degree temperatures. Even the parents who watch their children carefully can unknowingly leave a sleeping baby in a auto.
That happened just days after an 18-month-old girl died in a hot auto in Kansas.
North had his head down the whole time while he stood in front of a Carroll County judge.
According to the Carrollton Police Department incident report an officer arrived to find Travis North “extremely intoxicated and was combative”.
Police said the mother was in Atlanta at the time.
The deaths of the twin girls mark the 25th and 26th time a child had died inside hot vehicles nationwide this year, twice as many as the amount of children who had died during summer in 2015, according to Janette Fennell, president and founder of KidsAndCars.org, an organization that keeps tracks of hot auto deaths every year.
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“No one in the family, mothers, grandmothers, think (Asa North) did this intentionally”, Dobbs said.
