A mother left her sleeping three-year-old son in her car on a 41-degree Celsius day because he “slipped her mind.”
He was in the heat for nearly an hour while she shopped with her teenage daughter and bought an ice cream.
The Adelaide District Court heard the boy was hysterical and perspiring when a passer-by found him in the car park of Tea Tree Plaza shopping centre at Modbury in February 2014, ABC reports.
He was unharmed from the ordeal and his mother has pleaded not guilty to an aggravated charge of creating a risk of serious harm.
however, Prosecutor Andrew Fowler-Walker said she deliberately left her son in the car because he was sleeping.
“From her own record of interview, in the prosecution’s submission, she had a clear motive to leave her son in the car while she took her daughter shopping,” he said.
“She did not want to wake him because he gets irritable and complains and says he’s too tired to walk anywhere and that’s what happened in this case.”
“By the time the accused came wandering back from McDonald’s through Myer and stumbled across her child with the ambulance officer, that was a period of 51 minutes, so she was away from the child for 51 minutes,” he said.
The mother-of-three’s lawyer Adam Gaite argued it was a case of “forgetfulness” on her behalf.
“People can forget things for all sorts of reasons. This is a monumental case of inadvertence, but it doesn’t place her, in my respectful submission, into the category of a criminal,” he said.
