Enough is enough. Too many children have died when parents or guardians left them unattended in cars. As summer’s heat rises, such neglect, in effect, is a death sentence. Wake up, America, and don’t ever leave small children behind in a hot vehicle, which one emergency physician says is like “leaving your child in a lit oven.”

Besides protecting the child’s life, you may be helping your own. Increasingly, parents are being arrested and charged with such offenses as child abuse, child neglect or child endangerment. The last can be a felony leading to a jail sentence. Was it worth it to leave the child alone while you went inside a store for some cigarettes?

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Most parents are extremely protective of kids. But anytime they take them in a car or other vehicle they’re exposing them to the No. 1 killer of America’s children. Indeed, child safety advocate group Safe Kids USA reports that car accidents and other motor vehicle mishaps are the chief cause of child deaths between ages 3 and 14.

That’s confirmed by the National Center for Statistics and Analysis, which says car accidents are the top cause of deaths in kids aged 2-14. The center also says car accidents injure 250,000 American kids yearly. With about 2,000 of them suffering fatal injury, children are the victims in 5 per cent of America’s fatal traffic accidents. And unlike adults, it’s safe to say that no such child has caused the car accident in which he or she died.

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Studies show that persons who call and text while behind the wheel drive as poorly as if they were drunk. Now imagine a driver being drunk and using a cell phone at the same time.

That’s what Houston prosecutors are confronting as they assess the case of a man who reportedly was both drunk and receiving a cell phone call when he ran off a road and into a drainage ditch recently near Bush Intercontinental Airport, causing the unimaginable horror of drowning five young children who were occupants of the vehicle.

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The tragic news of an infant death in a stalled car on the Galveston Causeway Sunday lends a sobering reminder that simply doing the right thing by buying and using protective car seats may not always be enough. Car seat safety is no guarantee of survival.

Child safety seats are far more common today, now that each state has passed child occupant protection laws. Yet as many as 1,800 children under age 14 die annually in vehicle accidents.

Even more disturbing is the fact that some of these children, like the child killed Sunday, were killed while sitting in a car seat.

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