COURTESY LAURA BECK
They were a joyful little family—two parents madly in love, captivated by their firstborn, delighting in his every move. On a June morning in 2022, Laura Beck kissed her toddler son Anderson and husband Aaron goodbye, sending them off together—one to daycare and the other to his office.
In a few hours, her world would shatter. Anderson became one of 36 children to die of vehicular heatstroke that year after Aaron left the baby in his car seat and went to work. Upon discovering his mistake, Aaron took his own life. “Anderson was our entire world,” Laura tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue. “I don’t think Aaron thought there was any other way out of that situation.”
Like many, Laura, now 39, had questioned this type of tragedy long before it struck her own family. Such a horrific event could only happen to unthinking and careless parents, she had thought—surely not to a dad as committed as Aaron.
Amber Rollins, director of the national nonprofit Kids and Car Safety, “Most of us believe that hot-car deaths happen to ‘bad parents’ or overly distracted parents,” she says. “I’ve been doing this for 18 years, and I can tell you that what happens is a normal function in the memory systems in our brain.”
Neuroscientist David Diamond has a body of research that backs up this statement. For 20 years, he has studied this phenomenon and developed a hypothesis about how these tragedies occur. He calls the type of memory failure “the result of competition between the brain’s ‘habit memory’ system and its ‘prospective memory’ system.”
Prospective memory incorporates an intention to perform an action at a later time, typically with a delay between thinking about and performing the action. In this case, it provides access to one’s awareness that a child is in the car. Whereas habit memory refers to automatic actions, such as routinely driving a car from home to work, and refers entirely to actions going on in the present—often referred to as our “autopilot.”
Stress and sleep factors can skew brain memory systems toward habit-based activity and impair prospective memory processing. Diamond says that parents who’ve forgotten their children in cars often report these circumstances around the time of the drive. The Beck household experienced these elements on the day Aaron forgot Anderson: Among them, the baby had been sick for a few days previously, sleep had been interrupted, and a new work position for Laura meant the couple hadn’t yet set up a childcare drop-off routine.
Many of these are incidental to ordinary family life. On average, nearly 40 children die in hot cars every year. The United States has just seen its 13th child die this year after being left in a hot vehicle, according to Kids and Car Safety reports.
People began to accidentally leave children in cars in record numbers about 30 years ago. In the mid-1990s, child safety advocates began to campaign for children to ride in car backseats because they were getting injured or killed by airbags while riding in the front. At the same time, the use of rear-facing car seats became more popular, making children more vulnerable because drivers were unable to see them.
“That’s the point at which these tragedies began happening dozens of times every year,” says Rollins, “and they’ve trended upward ever since.”
However, neither the auto industry nor the nation’s highway safety agencies have moved forward robustly with effective solutions for occupant detection, says Rollins, although that technology is available. “Kids and Car Safety would like all vehicles to come equipped with a system that would detect occupants and alert a driver if a child has been left in a car,” Rollins shares. “This technology should be installed during the manufacturing of all vehicles.”
The most promising systems use radar (radio waves) that can sense an occupant with high precision and lidar (Light Detection and Ranging), which can detect micro-movements such as the heartbeat of an infant. “Occupant detection is going to save children’s lives,” Rollins adds. “It’s long overdue.”
From her home near Richmond, Va., Laura works with Kids and Car Safety in memory of her son and husband to help others avoid this catastrophe. “I want people to be aware of how easily these tragedies can occur,” she says. “I don’t want anyone else to go through this hell.”
For information and safety tips, see www.kidsandcars.org. If you or someone you know is considering suicide, please contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988, texting “STRENGTH” to the Crisis Text Line at 741741, or going to 988lifeline.org.
