Mom arrested for leaving kids in car while gambling

Wednesday, July 12, 2000 | 10:36 a.m.

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

BRIDGEPORT, Ind. -- A Virginia woman left six young children unattended in a sweltering sport-utility vehicle while she and her mother played the slot machines at a riverboat casino, police said.

The children, ages 1 to 11, were not injured. A security guard making routine rounds found them in a Caesars Glory of Rome parking garage shortly before 5 p.m. Sunday.

Police arrested Terry R. Peterson, 31, of Calland, Va., on six counts of neglect of a dependent. She spent Sunday night in the Harrison County Jail in Corydon and was released Monday morning after posting an $800 bond. She is scheduled to appear in court on July 31.

Peterson told police she and her mother just wanted to look around the casino, located about 10 miles west of Louisville, Ky.

Police estimated the children, Peterson's own four children and two cousins, had been inside a Chevrolet Suburban with the windows rolled down for about 25 minutes. The temperature was 90 degrees, with a heat index of 96, but Detective Manville Nagle of the Indiana State Police said the concrete parking garage was "like an oven."

The security guard moved the children to his air-conditioned car and gave them water.

Peterson told The Courier-Journal of Louisville in a telephone interview from her home in Virginia that she had stayed in the casino long enough to put $2 in a slot machine and was heading back to her car when police paged her.

"I know people must think I'm the worst mother, but I'm not," Peterson said. "I made a bad decision."