By STEVE RUBENSTEIN and KANTELE FRANKO
San Francisco Chronicle
Thursday, July 26, 2007
An 11-month-old boy died in the back seat of the family car after his father apparently forgot to drop him off at day care and instead left him locked inside the vehicle while he spent the day at work, police said.
The father, 46-year-old Danny Takemoto, left home early Tuesday with his son strapped into a child seat, according to Concord police Lt. David Chilimidos.
The man did not stop at the child-care center and went directly to his office at a medical-equipment company, parking his car, a blue Honda sedan, in the lot near the office.
His wife phoned him at work shortly before 3:30 p.m. to ask why the child-care facility had called her to report that her son was not there. In horror, Takemoto raced outside to the car and found the lifeless body of his son still strapped in the car seat, Chilimidos said.
Temperatures in Concord reached 80 on Tuesday, but the car windows were believed to have been rolled up, and extreme temperatures inside the car were probably a factor in the child's death, he said.
"It doesn't take very long to elevate the internal temperature inside a closed car," Chilimidos said.
Police questioned the father at police headquarters and booked him into jail on suspicion of manslaughter, Chilimidos said.
A woman who opened the front door of the family home in Benicia on Wednesday night and identified herself as a relative of the Takemotos said of the couple: "They're very distraught."
Every year, authorities say, about three-dozen U.S. children die of heat stroke after being left unattended in cars. Even a day with average weather conditions can raise temperatures inside a vehicle to life-threatening levels.
Several cases have occurred in the San Francisco Bay Area in recent years in which children died after being left unattended in cars.
In 2002, Lonnie Sopko, 60, of South San Francisco was charged with involuntary manslaughter after leaving his 5-month-old granddaughter, Kiana, inside a hot car, where she was found dead hours later. Sopko told authorities he had forgotten to drop his granddaughter off with the sitter.
After hearing of the death in Concord, the mother of Kiana Sopko said she could hardly believe such tragedies continue to occur.
"Oh, my God, not again," said Viengxay Sopko. "Why does this happen? It made me sick to my stomach."
Sopko, who moved from South San Francisco to Salt Lake City after the tragedy, said that to this day she walks through parking lots and peeks in the windows of strangers' cars to make sure no children are locked inside.
"It sounds crazy, I know," she said.
She said she has reconciled with her father-in-law, who was ordered by a judge to speak to parents' groups about the danger of leaving children in cars.
Sopko said she has trained herself to turn around and stare at the empty child seats in her own car even when she knows that her two surviving children -- Kalysa, 4, and Kasidy, 2 -- aren't in them. And then, after getting out of the car, she always looks a second time, through the car window.
Nine states, including California, have laws designed to prevent children from dying in overheated cars. In California, "Kaitlyn's Law" makes it illegal for any parent or guardian to leave any child 6 years or younger in a car without supervision.
(E-mail the writers at srubenstein(at)sfchronicle.com and kfranko(at)sfchronicle.com.)
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