Each year, approximately 37 children in the United States die from heatstroke after being left in a hot car. Vehicles can get extremely hot in a short period of time, and rolling the windows down or parking in the shade does little to decrease the risks.
Knowing about the risks of children being left in a hot car, one mom was terrified when her Tesla locked her toddler inside the vehicle unexpectedly. The mom, Kassandra Pineda, was charging her car on Monday, September 9, when her car locked her out.
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The car locked when she had finished charging it.
Per Inside Edition, Kassandra was charging her car at a Tesla Supercharger in the Los Angeles area. She disconnected the charging cable and her vehicle suddenly locked. Her 13-month-old baby boy, Liam Valenzuela, was still inside the car.
It was a scorching hot day.
Kassandra panicked and immediately started worrying about her son, knowing it was far too hot for him in the car. The mom told FOX 11 that she remembers the temperature being 109 degrees Fahrenheit the last time she had checked. "I can't even imagine how hot it was inside," she told the news outlet.
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She started screaming and trying to break the window.
Desperate to get Liam out of the car, the mom started screaming for help and "banging as hard as I could" on the window but "it wouldn't break," Kassandra told Fox 11.
She was terrified of losing her son. "I thought I was going to take my baby out of there lifeless," she told Inside Edition.
A bystander intervened.
A bystander, Adrian Ortega, who was also charging his car at the Tesla Supercharger, heard Kassandra's cries for help, calling it "horrifying seeing someone screaming," when speaking to Fox 11.
He told the news outlet that Kassandra was shouting things like, "My baby, my baby, my baby, please break the window, break the window!"
Adrian tried to help but also struggled to break the window. Luckily, he had a fishing weight, which he swung at the window to eventually break it.
Liam was OK, but appeared to be shocked.
Thanks to Adrian's help, Kassandra's son survived. The mom recalled how he was "sweating" and "red" when she removed him from the car. "He wasn't crying but I'm pretty sure he was in shock," she told Inside Edition.
The mom doesn't know what she would've done if Adrian hadn't been there to help her out. "If it wasn't for him, I don't know what would have happened with my son," she said.
It's unclear why the car locked.
Kassandra isn't sure why her Tesla locked on its own, but she told Fox 11 that she's now "terrified" of driving the car. She claims the footage from the incident was deleted after she took the car in to identify the problem. Employees told her that there was nothing wrong with her vehicle, she alleged.
