A three-year-old boy has died after a child protective services driver left him in a hot car for more than five hours after shopping for tobacco and buying food.
Ketorrius ‘KJ’ Starks Jr was discovered by police in the vehicle parked in the driveway of a home in Birmingham, Alabama, after his foster parent went to pick him up from daycare and staff realized he was missing.
A transport driver had picked Ketorrius up to take him to the Department of Human Resources (DHR) office in Bessemer to visit his biological father, according to his aunt, Brittney Debruce.
But Ketorrius never made it back to the daycare center.
Police found the boy inside the vehicle parked on the 1500 block of Pine Tree Drive. The windows were closed and the engine was not running.
Ketorrius was trapped in the hot car from 12.30pm to 5.30pm on Tuesday, according to Chief Deputy Coroner Bill Yates. He was pronounced dead at the scene shortly after 6pm.
‘This is a parent’s worst nightmare,’ stated his parents, according to their attorney Courtney French on Friday.
‘Our baby should be alive.’
Ketorrius’ parents and family members were devastated and ‘we don’t know what’s going on’, Debruce told AL.com.
The DHS stated that the child ‘was being transported by a contract provider when the incident occurred’ and that the the provider has fired the driver.
DHS said it could not comment on exactly what happened and the child’s identity.
Ketorrius was picked up from daycare at 9am to visit his dad and was there until 11.30am, according to French. The driver then allegedly stopped to shop at a tobacco store and pick up food for her family.
The worker then drove to her own home and left Ketorrius in the car, French said.
‘With the current extreme outside temperatures and the heat index of 108 degrees, the interior temperature of the car where KJ was trapped likely exceeded 150 degrees,’ the attorney said.
‘This is a heartbreaking and preventable tragedy.’
Ketorrius Starkes Sr described his son as a ‘smart, brilliant, bright little child’.
The driver worked for The Covenant Services, which is affiliated with the DHR, according to French.
Ketorrius lived in a foster home in Bessemer, which is about 15 miles southwest of Birmingham.
He was the first child to die in a hot car this year in the state, and the sixteenth across the US, according to Kids and Car Safety.
It happened just a couple of weeks after a one-year-old California boy died after his mother allegedly left him and his older brother in a hot car for more than an hour while she got lip filler. The boy’s two-year-old brother survived.
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