Columnist Susan Snyder: Negligence is not for us to judge

Friday, July 20, 2001 | 9:17 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Fridays, Sundays and Tuesdays. Reach her at snyder@lasvegassun.com or 259-4082.

I really was going to let this topic pass.

There was so much e-mail and so many telephone calls in response to Sunday's column about tots who die in hot cars because their parents are harried and forget they are there.

People were outraged. Some offered solutions. Some offered reasons. Most asked for a second piece on the subject. But even that wasn't enough to make me delve into those dark depths again.

This was: Paul Wayment, a 38-year-old Utah man, shot himself to death after a judge on Tuesday sentenced him to 30 days in jail for the negligent death of his 28-month-old son.

Wayment was to begin his sentence Wednesday morning, but never showed. Searchers found his body later that day in the same northern Utah mountains where he'd left his sleeping son in a pickup truck Oct. 26 while he scouted for deer. In the 45 minutes Wayment was gone, his only child awoke and wandered off. The tot's frozen body was found five days later still clad in his footsie pajamas.

Perhaps the jail sentence placated those outraged by Wayment's poor judgment -- people whose knowledge of the tragedy is based solely on what they've read or heard. People who had, for a day, the fodder for office coffee-pot gossip. "Served him right."

It's easy to point the finger when it's not your fault, your negligence, your child.

In our valley plenty of us have been pointing at two sets of Las Vegas parents whose infants died in hot cars because the parents forgot the babies were with them.

Reader Judy Gibson, a Las Vegas mom of seven, suggests we stop pointing and start preventing.

"I know the easy thing to do would be to condemn these seemingly neglectful moms. Until we've all had the brain of a sleep-deprived, hormone unbalanced new mom, I don't think we should do that," Gibson wrote in an e-mail.

She says such deaths may decrease if infants in rear-facing car seats placed in back were visible by the driver. She suggests designing a forward-facing baby seat that's safe or installing mirrors so the child is conspicuous.

Sandy Smith, a 54-year-old grandmother of six, wrote, "I am horrified! But I can remember back to the days of being a new mother and how hectic it was working full time and taking my two children to the baby sitter's."

There is no justification for forgetting a child, she says. But it is happening too often, and ranting doesn't solve the problem.

Smith has a friend in North Carolina who invented a light that goes on when a child up to 50 pounds is placed in a car seat. It doesn't go off until the child is removed. The Child Car Seat Monitor, made by SoTec Inc., costs about $30. The company's website is sotec-inc.com.

Such measures might help, but mechanical devices still cannot replace good judgment. And when another's judgment fails, it can be hard for the rest of us to understand why punishment is not swift and severe.

"These parents should be examples of what will happen not if, but when it happens again," writes one retired Las Vegas woman who was a single mom.

They already are. And maybe Utah's Wayment has shown us that any punishment we impose can't intensify the torment that already burdens them.

The Utah man deliberately left his son alone, and that made his burden different.