An Oklahoma police officer’s body camera captured the confrontation with a mother who left her toddler inside a hot van in a Walmart parking lot on Tuesday afternoon.
Police responded to the scene after several witnesses reported hearing the one-year-old child calling for help.
“We walked past the van and it didn’t quite sit right with me,” said Chrysty Lansdowne. “I just said to Jay, ‘What was that sound?”
Landsdowne told KJRH they stopped and looked through the windows of the van. That’s when they spotted the child covered in sweat.
Luckily, one of the doors of the van was unlocked and the child was pulled to safety.
When police arrived on scene, they confronted the child’s mother, Hannah Secondi, as she was leaving the store. They say she “began frantically asking if her child was deceased.”
The police officer’s body camera captured the confrontation.
Secondi: “Oh my God!”
Officer: “Are you the mother?”
Secondi: “She’s dead!”
Officer: “No, she’s not.”
Secondi told officers the 1-year-old was inside the car for about 45 minutes and that she had forgotten her when she went into the store.
However, Landsdowne says Secondi left the store with another child and doesn’t believe the 1-year-old was simply forgotten.
“It is not like, ‘Oh, I just ran inside real quick, I completely forgot, the day was crazy,’and she was alone,” she said. “There was [sic] more people with her. There is no reason why the baby should have been left in the car. Not at all.”
Secondi was arrested for child abuse and booked into the Tulsa County Jail on $50,000 bond.
According to the police report, the outside temperature when the child was found inside the car was 95 degrees with a heat index of 103.
