In what one mother has described as the most terrifying moment of her life, she accidentally locked her newborn in her hot car. Afraid for her baby’s well-being, she immediately called 911, but she wasn’t prepared for the dispatcher’s response.
Lacey Guyton was visiting her grandma when she experienced the scariest moment of her life, KCRA reported. The Michigan mom had put her 2-month-old baby, Raina, in her car seat, placed the infant’s diaper bag in the car, and shut the door. She then walked around the car to her door, only to hear all the doors randomly lock. At that point, Lacey realized the keys were in her diaper bag, which was in the locked car, along with her newborn baby, she explained in a Facebook post.
Having only a key fob and push-button-to-start car, “touching the door handle with the keys inside should’ve unlocked the door,” Lacey explained, but much to her dismay, “it didn’t.” That’s when the mom says her “heart sank,” and she had her grandma immediately call 911 while she “grabbed a chunk of asphalt off the ground” and started “bashing it” into the front passenger window of the car as hard as she could. When that failed, Lacey’s grandma retrieved a window breaker for the mom to try.
Unfortunately, all of her efforts were “doing nothing,” and the 911 operator’s response only made the ordeal even worse. “The 911 dispatcher told my grandma to call a tow company because they don’t send anyone out to unlock cars or break windows,” the mom recalled but explained that she didn’t have time to wait for a tow company because Raina was screaming and getting hotter in the car. Frustrated, Lacey called 911 again, telling the dispatcher again that her 2-month-old infant was locked in the hot car.
Lacey asked the dispatcher to please send fire rescue just to smash my window as she didn’t want to wait for someone to unlock the door while her baby was getting hotter by the minute. Again, however, the 911 operator said she would transfer the mom to a tow company because “they don’t send anyone out to break windows or unlock cars,” the mom said. Not knowing what else to do, Lacey decided to ask the tow company to come while she kept trying to break the window.
Unfortunately, as Lacey waited, things seemed to go from bad to worse rather quickly. “I checked on Raina again real quick and saw she stopped crying and was starting to close her eyes,” she recalled, explaining that she was unsure whether Raina was falling asleep or if she might be dying in the hot car. With her daughter’s health in question and realizing that emergency rescue wasn’t coming to save her baby, Lacey said she experienced “the worst feeling in the world.”
Perhaps it was that feeling that finally gave the mother enough strength to save her daughter as Lacey ran to the rear window, giving it two hard hits with the window breaker. Finally, the glass shattered, allowing the mom to crawl into the vehicle and rescue her child, who was drenched in sweat but thankfully started screaming when Lacey grabbed her. “I never felt more relieved,” she recalled. However, 911’s response still left her unsettled, prompting her to speak out.
According to Lacey, the tow company didn’t arrive for another 12 minutes after she had already rescued Raina from the hot car and calmed her down, and Lacey believes if she had waited, it would’ve been too late. “It was the most traumatic 15 minutes of my entire life,” Lacey explained. She added that although they were so thankful Raina was okay, they were also “extremely pissed that after calling 911 twice” while her daughter’s life was “on the line,” a dispatcher who’s “been there for years, still refused to send help.”
Waterford police called Lacey to apologize for what happened. “It’s a common-sense issue,” Chief Scott Underwood said. “You call 911, you expect for somebody to come and give you some help, and we certainly should have gone and done that. We made a mistake and we need to fix that,” he added, saying the dispatcher would face disciplinary action.
As for the family, they just want to ensure nothing like this happens to anyone else who might also experience a malfunctioning key fob that causes a child to become trapped in a hot vehicle. “It’s the most helpless feeling to see your great-grandbaby in there crying and drenched in sweat,” grandmother Mary Riley said. “We want this corrected. We don’t want anybody to lose their baby because this wasn’t taken care of for us.”
Lacey Guyton echoed similar sentiments, saying it shouldn’t take additional training for a 911 dispatcher to know to send help. She also shared useful information with others, should they ever find themselves in the middle of such a nightmare. “I now know that the back windshield of a car is the easiest to break,” she wrote. “[I]n a situation like this, don’t waste your time trying to break the side windows, just go right for the back windshield!” she advised as she encouraged others to share “because I desperately wish I had known that before.”
