A child was found dead outside an early childhood education center in Plantation on Monday after his father returned to pick him up, only to realize the child had been left in the hot car all day.
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Plantation officers and fire rescue crews were called to A World of Discovery Academy in the 7000 block of Northwest Fourth Street shortly after 5:30 p.m. after receiving a “report of a deceased child in a vehicle,” the department said in a statement shared on X on Monday night.
“Upon arrival, Plantation Fire Department sadly confirmed the child was deceased,” the statement said.
A death investigation is underway. The police department did not release additional information Tuesday afternoon.
The family-owned academy is a bilingual early childhood education center that offers programs for children ranging in age from 3 months to 4 years, according to its website.
Leslie Novoa, the academy’s director and owner, told the South Florida Sun Sentinel that she knew the family and the child well. “This is a tragedy that happened to them and to all of us,” she said.
The child was an 18-month-old boy who attended the school. He had an older sibling who also attended, and the family had been with the daycare center for six years, Novoa said.
“They are a very loving and caring family,” she said Tuesday morning at the center, which was open, but the mood was somber. Children could be seen playing outside in the back, where an iron fence separates their well-shaded playground from a tree-lined parking lot next door.
The mother and father would take turns bringing the children in, Novoa said. The parents had already advised the center that the older child would not be there Monday. When no one showed up with the younger baby, no one at the center realized anything was wrong. Ordinarily, said Novoa, the center would reach out to the family by the end of the week to make sure there’s a record of every reason for an absence.
The boy’s father was supposed to drop the boy off at school in the morning but forgot he was in the car, Novoa told the South Florida Sun Sentinel. The father then went to work and drove to the center later in the afternoon, she said, believing his child was there.
The baby’s father seemed sure there must have been some mistake when he arrived that afternoon, Novoa said, but he didn’t realize what happened until he opened his back door to prepare to load the baby into his car seat.
“He opened the door, then slammed it shut,” she said. “And he let out this scream.”
Novoa saw the boy in the back, she said, and had someone call 911.
At least eight other children in the U.S. have died in hot cars since the beginning of 2026, according to the education and public awareness group Kids and Cars, and three of the nine total cases happened in Florida.
On June 20, a 3-year-old boy died after he had been unknowingly left in a car in Hillsborough County, WTSP-TV reported. In March, an infant in Winter Haven died after she was left in a car for an unknown amount of time, Fox 13 Tampa Bay reported.
Nearly 40 children die in hot cars every year in the U.S. on average, about one every nine days, according to a fact sheet from Kids and Cars. The vast majority of children who have died in hot cars are age 3 or younger. Nearly half of all children who were unknowingly left in hot cars were supposed to be dropped off at childcare, according to the group.
Many of those deaths are accidental, and occur when a parent or caretaker is operating out of habit, then forgets that the child is in the car because the child’s presence is not part of their normal routine, according to Amber Rollins, the group’s executive director, who describes the phenomenon as “losing awareness.”
Perhaps they were sharing the responsibility of dropping off the child with the other parent, and had gone on a day that wasn’t normally theirs, or perhaps they dropped their older child off first when normally they dropped off that child second. The driver may not detect their child in the back if the child is quiet and in a rear-facing car seat, Rollins said.
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The forgetting itself arises out of a conflict between two different memory systems that operate in different parts of the brain, said Dr. David Diamond, a neuroscientist at the University of South Florida. One is an “autopilot system” that allows people to do things without thinking about them consciously, like driving to work or throwing a basketball. The other is the conscious memory system, which allows people to pay attention to details.
“The autopilot system can actually kind of shut down the conscious memory system,” Diamond said. “… It’s the autopilot system that takes us straight from work to home, and the conscious memory system that says ‘today I need to stop at store and pick up medication.’ These two systems are competing.”
Stress, sleep deprivation or other factors can add to the likelihood that a parent’s autopilot system takes over, Diamond said. Meanwhile, temperatures inside of cars can reach 125 degrees in minutes, even with windows cracked, and children overheat as much as five times faster than adults. These factors create a “perfect storm” that can culminate in the child’s death, Rollins said.
Rollins and Diamond both recommend safety measures that would help prevent parents from forgetting their children, such as always checking the back seat or putting a children’s toy in the front seat whenever the child is in the car, so that there is a reminder.
Some cars also have technology that alerts drivers to the presence of a child inside a car, but much of it is insufficient, Rollins said.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration was supposed to issue a rule in 2023 requiring the auto industry to include technology in all vehicles to alert drivers to the presence of a child in the car, Rollins said, but the agency has not yet done so.
Diamond and Rollins have both advocated against criminalizing parents who leave their children in hot cars when there is no evidence that the parent was aware of what they were doing or that other factors were at play, like substance use. Still, parents continue to face charges from negligence to manslaughter and murder, said Diamond, who often serves as a defense expert witness in such cases. Florida is particularly harsh when it comes to prosecuting parents or caretakers, Rollins said.
The majority of parents do not believe they would forget their own children in the car, Rollins said, but she has worked to dispute that assumption, saying it leads parents to be less vigilant over their own children.
Elizabeth Morales, a 58-year-old mother of four who lives in Sunrise, told the Sun Sentinel that she has twice forgotten her own children in the car, only to realize before tragedy struck.
The first time was in 1999, she recalled. She had picked her 10-month-old daughter up from daycare, parked, and gone into her house without remembering that her daughter was in the car. In fact, she had forgotten that she picked her up and thought her daughter’s father had done so. It wasn’t until he asked her where their daughter was that she remembered she was in the car, Morales said. Luckily, she had been in the car for only a few minutes.
The second time, Morales was supposed to drop her 2-year-old daughter off at daycare but forgot she was in the car and proceeded to work instead, she said. She was distracted by the stress of work and going through a divorce. It wasn’t until her daughter made a noise that she remembered that the girl was in the car and did a U-turn to go back to daycare.
“It wasn’t something malicious,” Morales said. “You do everything normal, but your brain is focused on another routine. It can happen; I’m a testimony that it can happen.”
Rollins herself recalled a day in the middle of summer when she was driving her son to daycare, which he had just started that week. By that point, she had already been researching the dangers of leaving children in hot cars for years.
She ended up at a stop sign, and her habit memory kicked in, causing her to start driving towards the home of her daughter’s friend without ever dropping him off. She was halfway home when her son made a screeching sound in the back seat that reminded her he was there. She jumped out of the car and began crying hysterically, she said, realizing what had almost happened.
“Every single parent who’s ever been in charge of transporting their child, this has happened to, they’ve lost awareness,” she said. “But they don’t realize, don’t connect the dots and say ‘oh, that’s what causes hot car deaths.’ Because anybody else in that situation would’ve probably just gone ‘Oh what an idiot, oh what am I doing, oh mommy brain,’ and just gone on with their day. What they don’t realize is they were one tiny dinosaur screech sound from leaving their baby in the car.”
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