Distressing moment whimpering toddler siblings are rescued from roasting 117f car by hero deputies
The Cobb County Police Department recently released distressing video of the June 4 incident in the parking lot of the Cumberland Mall in Atlanta.
Deputies rushed to the scene when a concerned shopper said she noticed two sobbing children, aged one and two years old, in the backseat of an unattended car on the day that saw temperatures as high as 87 degrees Fahrenheit.
The windows were slightly open, she told the 911 operator, but it made no difference - as the car's internal temperature had reached 117 degrees.
'I am standing outside the Dick's at Cumberland Mall and there are two children in a car by themselves - small kids crying,' she said. 'The windows are cracked, but I don't think that's right.'
One of the toddlers was heard whimpering in the background of the nerve-wracking phone recording, which was shared by the police department.
Their father, J'Quawn Dixon, had allegedly gone into the mall at 12:24pm, a security guard told police. By the time officers were notified and arrived at the parked car, it was 1:03pm.
The cops said they were greeted by three bystanders gathered around the turned-off car, keeping an eye on the boy and girl while their parent was nowhere to be found, according to the video.
Swiftly acting, an officer busted the front window to reach in and unlock the doors to safely get to the terrified and confused siblings.
'Hey buddy,' one of the cops calmly said to the little boy as he unbuckled the child, who's crying seemed to subside. 'It's okay.'
He also noted the child felt very warm from sitting in the stifling heat.
The police were seen carrying both kids as EMS arrived to take them to the hospital for evaluations.
When Dixon returned, he was immediately handcuffed and arrested. He was booked into the Cobb County Adult Detention Center and charged with two counts of second-degree cruelty to his small children.
He is no longer in custody, according to inmate records.
The bodycam footage documenting the events that led to Dixon's arrest was released just weeks after California police had to save a child from similar circumstances.
The Corona Police department was called on June 17 amid reports of a baby alone in a car with 'the engine off and windows up.'
'When officers arrived on scene, they observed the baby in distress, and breached a window to extricate him,' they said.
The footage shows the two officers rushing to the car and not hesitating once they realized the baby was inside.
One officer peered inside the front windscreen and returned a moment later with a metal crowbar used to shatter the front driver's side window.
The car was then unlocked from the inside and the second officer immediately pulled the tiny baby out of the back seat.
A thermometer reading of the car revealed the internal temperature had reached 110 degrees.
It is unclear how long the baby was trapped in the car and officers also did not provide any further details about the child's parents.
Roughly 37 American children die from being trapped or left to roast in hot cars each year, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).
More than half of all hot car deaths are the result of someone forgot their child in the vehicle.
About 47 percent of people who forget their kids in the backseat meant to drop them off at school or daycare, NHTSA reported.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
‘It became a game to people': how online sleuths grew obsessed with the Idaho murders
On the morning of 13 November 2022, Hunter Johnson and Emily Alandt, two students at the University of Idaho in Moscow, answered an odd phone call. Their friend Dylan Mortensen, who lived just a few houses away, heard strange noises during the night and was scared. Her four upstairs roommates weren't answering their phones – could they come over and check on things? Johnson and Alandt weren't particularly concerned, Moscow being a quiet college town of unlocked doors, until they reached 1122 King Road. The usually boisterous residence, the node of a sprawling friend group, was eerily quiet. Johnson proceeded up the stairs and into the bedroom where his best friend, Ethan Chapin, 20, was staying over with his girlfriend, Xana Kernodle, also 20. Then, to spare the others the trauma of a ghastly sight, he told the girls to call 911 for an 'unconscious individual'. By now, the clinical facts of the University of Idaho murders, as they have become known, have been published and republished, dissected to death online and seared into the consciousness of even casual news consumers. So One Night in Idaho: The College Murders, a new Amazon docuseries that includes, for the first time, extensive interviews with Johnson, Alandt and other close friends and family, takes a different approach – not a chronology of the murders of Chapin, Kernodle and her roommates, Madison Mogen, 21 and Kaylee Goncalves, 21, but how the crime and its nuclear fallout landed on their loved ones. How much confusion ensued in the hours after the 911 call, as more and more friends, including Chapin's fellow triplets, Hunter and Maizie, gathered outside the house, while police searched and said nothing; the group got confirmation that their friends had died not from officers on the scene, but from a campus shelter-in-place alert to their phones. 'In the crime genre, the majority of those are told through the lens of an investigator or law enforcement or a journalist,' Matthew Galkin, co-director of the series with Liz Garbus, said. 'We wanted to flip the script with this one because we felt like that was the part of the story that hadn't been told yet.' Plenty of other stories were – within hours of the discovery, the four murders made international news. Reporters from outlets around the country descended on the small, formerly quiet community in the northern Idaho panhandle. The house at 1122 King Road became not only an active crime scene but a grim tourist attraction, drawing amateur sleuths and true crime enthusiasts who posted photos of blood dripping down the house's foundation. The tragedy was catnip for widespread attention – four photogenic, white, very online kids whose public social media profiles provided ample material for amateur sleuths; the group posed and posted classically college photos, all tangled together before a football game, the day before they were brutally stabbed to death. Authorities revealed next to no information – no leads, no suspected motive, no known connections to a killer at large. Plenty of space for sideline conjecture, or as Galkin put it, 'a perfect storm for that kind of social media scrutiny'. The first two episodes of the series relive those horrific initial six weeks for friends and family, as they were bombarded with media requests, unsolicited direct messages or accusations of murder themselves, on top of unimaginable grief. Anonymous websites argued that Johnson – the kid that found his best friend murdered — was the killer, based on his friends' social media snippets. Amateur sleuths snuck into classes and dorms. Others tried to access the house, still roped off with caution tape. 'All of a sudden there are blueprints of the house and people are making 3D models,' Galkin said. 'It just became almost like a game to people.' For those close to the victims, so-called Reddit detectives and anonymous DMs threatening retribution were just as scary as the fact that the real killer was still at large. 'I was once again fearing for my life but for a completely different reason,' Daniel Berriochoa, Chapin's fraternity brother and one of the last people to see him alive, recalls in the series. Direct threats aside, 'I don't think the majority of people were malicious in what they were doing. I certainly think there was a legitimate desire to solve this,' said Galkin. But the naming of suspects in public went 'haywire' – 'these people aren't law enforcement. They're not lawyers. They have no right to pick people they don't know and accuse them of horrific crimes and then just sit back and watch it all happen.' Six weeks after the murders, authorities arrested Bryan Kohberger, a 28-year-old criminology student at Washington State University, a 15-minute drive over the border from Idaho's campus, at his parents' house in Pennsylvania. According to a probable cause affidavit, investigators found him based on DNA evidence from the button of a knife sheath left at the scene. One would think an arrest would tamp down speculation, but new questions only fueled it – why did he do it? How did he know the victims? Why did he leave two – Mortensen and Bethany Funke – unscathed? It was at this point that Galkin and Garbus entered the picture and began speaking with families about telling their side of the story. As with Garbus's recent series on the Gilgo Beach serial killer, there would be hard rules: 'We go by facts. We do nothing salacious. We do nothing gratuitous,' said Galkin. There would be no blood, no bodies, just recreations of the victims' rooms as they would have existed prior. 'We can have people tell us the story and infer visually what happened, but you don't have to go there.' Though grounded in first-hand experiences, the series stays attuned to larger forces – online speculation, the ongoing information vacuum from authorities after a court's gag order, and Kohberger's potential links to hyper-misogynistic incel ('involuntary celibate') ideology. The latter half of the series speculates that Kohberger posted creepy questions about the murders – which hand did he use? Did he shower at the house after? – in a large true crime Facebook group as 'Pappa Rodger', perhaps in a nod to 'incel hero' Elliot Rodger, who killed six and injured 14 during a murderous rampage in California in 2014. Rodger targeted an Alpha Phi sorority house and left behind manifestos and videos railing against women who rejected him. Goncalves was a member of Alpha Phi at the University of Idaho, while Kernodle and Mogen were members of Pi Beta Phi. The question undergirding all this attention remains: why? 'We went as far as we could possibly go with answering that question without having actual facts because there was no process of discovery and there was no trial,' said Galkin. But based on what has been revealed, 'I don't believe that it was a completely random act of violence,' he said. 'He didn't just pick four strangers. I feel like there was at least one of them that he had tracked at least somewhat.' Whatever evidence investigators found of Kohberger's intentions, or any connection to the victims, remains an open question that may never be answered. Earlier this month, Kohberger pleaded guilty to all four murders, thus avoiding a long-delayed trial scheduled for next month as well as the death penalty. He will spend the rest of his life in prison without parole, pending a judge's acceptance of the deal later this month. The deal, a week before the series aired, 'caught us all off guard', Galkin said. 'There were some grumblings that it was possible, but I didn't actually think it would happen.' Immediately, some loved ones vehemently opposed it; in a statement, the Goncalves family, who did not participate in the series, said they were 'beyond furious' at a 'very unexpected decision' they did not consider to be justice. Others who did – including the Chapins and Mogen's mother and stepfather – expressed support, relieved not to endure the trauma of a long trial with graphic evidence and the possibility that Kohberger walked free. 'We can actually put this behind us and not have these future dates and future things that we don't want to have to be at, that we shouldn't have to be at, that have to do with this terrible person,' Mogen's father, Ben, told CBS. 'We get to just think about the rest of lives and have to try and figure out how to do it without Maddie and the rest of the kids.' Galkin and Garbus added a title card explaining the outcome at the end of the final episode, though it does not change its focus: remembering how the four victims lived, in the words of the people who actually knew them. Mogen was sweet, quiet and slyly funny with her distinctive dance moves; Goncalves was ambitious and sparkly; 'DJ Xan' Kernodle insisted on bringing her MacBook computer everywhere to play her music; Chapin never missed an opportunity to make people laugh. And for Galkin and Garbus, to offer a true crime series that warns against the obsession with true crimes concerning real people. 'There is a time and a place for amateur sleuthing. But there's also a human toll,' said Galkin. 'Hopefully, this series allows you to look in their eyes and just understand what this is doing to people. Maybe people might think twice before they do this on the next enormous crime story.' One Night in Idaho: The College Murders is now available on Amazon Prime Video
Reuters
an hour ago
- Reuters
US Justice fires nine more employees from Jack Smith's team, sources say
WASHINGTON, July 11 (Reuters) - U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi on Friday fired at least nine more Justice Department employees who worked for Special Counsel Jack Smith to investigate President Donald Trump's retention of classified records and efforts to overturn the 2020 election, according to five people familiar with the matter. At least two of the people fired were prosecutors who most recently worked in other U.S. Attorney's offices in Florida and North Carolina, three of the sources told Reuters. The other seven people served as support staff to Smith's team, two other sources said. The Justice Department since January has been purging employees who worked on matters involving President Donald Trump or his supporters. Fourteen attorneys who worked on Smith's team were fired on January 27 because of work on cases against Trump, becoming some of the department's earliest casualties in the purge. Including the people fired on Friday, at least 26 people who worked on Smith's team have been terminated since Trump took office on January 20. The Justice Department in recent months has also fired people who handled casework involving defendants who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an attempt to block Congress from certifying President Joe Biden's 2020 election win. In late June, two prosecutors and a supervisor, one of whom had worked on cases involving the Proud Boys, were fired. Earlier this month, Bondi also fired a career veteran of the department who served as a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington. In late January, the Justice Department also fired probationary prosecutors who had worked on January 6 cases.
The Independent
2 hours ago
- The Independent
Judge orders Trump administration to halt indiscriminate immigration stops, arrests in California
A federal judge on Friday ordered the Trump administration to halt indiscriminate immigration stops and arrests in seven California counties, including Los Angeles. Immigrant advocacy groups filed the lawsuit last week accusing President Donald Trump's administration of systematically targeting brown-skinned people in Southern California during its ongoing immigration crackdown. The plaintiffs include three detained immigrants and two U.S. citizens, one who was held despite showing agents his identification. The filing in U.S. District Court asked a judge to block the administration from using what they call unconstitutional tactics in immigration raids. Immigrant advocates accuse immigration officials of detaining someone based on their race, carrying out warrantless arrests, and denying detainees access to legal counsel at a holding facility in downtown LA. Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said in an email that 'any claims that individuals have been 'targeted' by law enforcement because of their skin color are disgusting and categorically FALSE.' McLaughlin said 'enforcement operations are highly targeted, and officers do their due diligence' before making arrests. Judge Maame E. Frimpong also issued a separate order barring the federal government from restricting attorney access at a Los Angeles immigration detention facility. Frimpong issued the orders the day after a hearing during which advocacy groups argued that the government was violating the Fourth and Fifth amendments of the constitution. Immigrants and Latino communities across Southern California have been on edge for weeks since the Trump administration stepped up arrests at car washes, Home Depot parking lots, immigration courts and a range of businesses. Tens of thousands of people have participated in rallies in the region over the raids and the subsequent deployment of the National Guard and Marines. The order also applies to Ventura County, where busloads of workers were detained Thursday while the court hearing was underway after federal agents descended on a cannabis farm, leading to clashes with protesters and multiple injuries. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, the recent wave of immigration enforcement has been driven by an 'arbitrary arrest quota' and based on 'broad stereotypes based on race or ethnicity.' When detaining the three day laborers who are plaintiffs in the lawsuit, all immigration agents knew about them is that they were Latino and were dressed in construction work clothes, the filing said. It goes on to describe raids at swap meets and Home Depots where witnesses say federal agents grabbed anyone who 'looked Hispanic.' ACLU attorney Mohammad Tajsar said Brian Gavidia, one of the U.S. citizens who was detained, was 'physically assaulted ... for no other reason than he was Latino and working at a tow yard in a predominantly Latin American neighborhood.' Tajsar asked why immigration agents detained everyone at a car wash except two white workers, according to a declaration by a car wash worker, if race wasn't involved. Representing the government, attorney Sean Skedzielewski said there was no evidence that federal immigration agents considered race in their arrests, and that they only considered appearance as part of the 'totality of the circumstances' including prior surveillance and interactions with people in the field. In some cases, they also operated off 'targeted, individualized packages,' he said. 'The Department of Homeland Security has policy and training to ensure compliance with the Fourth Amendment,' Skedzielewski said. Lawyers from Immigrant Defenders Law Center and other groups say they also have been denied access to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in downtown LA known as 'B-18' on several occasions since June, according to court documents. Lawyer Mark Rosenbaum said in one incident on June 7 attorneys 'attempted to shout out basic rights' at a bus of people detained by immigration agents in downtown LA when the government drivers honked their horns to drown them out and chemical munitions akin to tear gas were deployed. Skedzielewski said access was only restricted to 'protect the employees and the detainees' during violent protests and it has since been restored. Rosenbaum said lawyers were denied access even on days without any demonstrations nearby, and that the people detained are also not given sufficient access to phones or informed that lawyers were available to them. He said the facility lacks adequate food and beds, which he called 'coercive' to getting people to sign papers to agree to leave the country before consulting an attorney. Attorneys general for 18 Democratic states also filed briefs in support of the orders. U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents were already barred from making warrantless arrests in a large swath of eastern California after a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction in April.
