Columnist Susan Snyder: Being too busy can be tragic

Friday, July 13, 2001 | 4:56 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column also appears Tuesdays and Fridays in the Las Vegas Sun. Reach her at snyder@vegas.com or 259-4082.

How did we become so busy?

The question and the incidents that provoked it have been analyzed and publicly probed to a weary end.

When Clark County District Attorney Stewart Bell said earlier this week that no charges would be pressed against a couple who accidentally left their 6-month-old son in a car for more than five hours, all seemed over and done.

But Jeannie Cosgrove's phone is still ringing. So maybe there is something left to ponder.

"I've gotten a ton of calls. People are outraged," said Cosgrove, of the Clark County SAFE KIDS Coalition.

She has copies of autopsy reports for the 6-month-old child who died June 29, and for a 9-month-old boy who died May 24 after his mother went on a lunch date with a girlfriend but forgot to take him from the car when they dropped off their other children at the baby-sitter's home.

He spent two hours strapped in his car seat before she returned and discovered him there.

Parents in the more recent case said a change in their hectic morning routine of taking their older daughter to one day care and their infant son to another led to the infant being accidentally left in the car for 5 1/2 hours.

The temperature inside the car when paramedics arrived was 144 degrees, even though the parents had put the sunshade in the windshield, Cosgrove said.

"These last two cases bother me terribly," she said. "How many times in your life do you even leave your groceries in the car? When you have ice cream, you don't forget. And yet you forget your baby?"

The parents in both cases may never fully recover from the horror of these accidents. The thought of trying to get past such a thing is beyond words.

But it's not just here. An Associated Press report released Thursday said a 6-month-old North Carolina child died Wednesday after being left in a car for nearly six hours. The baby's father told authorities he thought he had dropped off the child at the baby-sitter's house.

In Minnesota on Tuesday, a 4-month-old boy died after being left in the family's minivan for eight hours. Again, the father said he forgot to take the baby to day care and didn't realize the tot was still in the car.

What could possibly be less forgettable? The dry cleaning? The morning meeting? The stop at Starbucks?

Las Vegas Fire officials told Cosgrove that in May they responded to 58 911 calls regarding children left alone in closed-up vehicles. In June they received 66 such calls.

And that's just Las Vegas Fire, she said. It doesn't include any such calls received by Clark County or other departments in the valley.

At least 120 children across the country died in hot cars from 1996 through 2000, according to numbers from the SAFE KIDS national office.

In Clark County alone we've had three die in less than two months. The third, a 6-year-old boy, perished when he locked himself in a car during a game of hide-and-seek.

"I just don't know what's going on," Cosgrove said. "They took the time to put the sunshade up and then forgot the baby?"

Hard questions that beg for answers.

How did we become so busy?