By Chantal Da Silva -
NBC News
An 11-month-old baby died abandoned in a parked vehicle in Tallahassee, Florida, for an "extended period of time," police said.
The Tallahassee Police Department (TPD, for its acronym in English) communicated on Tuesday that it was conducting an investigation after the incident.
[The heat puts millions in the US on alert and breaks records in Europe. Biden considers declaring a national climate emergency]
The baby was found in the vehicle parked in the 1700 block of Mahan Center Boulevard.
"The minor was left in a parked vehicle for an extended period of time and unfortunately succumbed to his injuries," the department said.
The US is boiling under infernal (and unusual) heat and the thermometer threatens to continue rising
July 19, 202201:57
The Tallahassee Democrat newspaper reported that the vehicle had been parked outside a local hospice called Big Bend Hospice.
TPD spokeswoman Heather Merritt told the newspaper that medical center employees had "called 911 regarding the child in the vehicle."
Police could not definitively confirm whether the death was heat-related, the newspaper reported.
No arrests have been made in connection with the incident.
If the death were related to high temperatures, it would mark the 11th death of an infant from heatstroke inside a vehicle in the United States so far this year and the second in Florida, according to NoHeatStroke.org, which tracks deaths from heatstroke in automobiles across the country.
[Extreme Heat Wave to Continue for Another Week in Texas and Spread to Northeast Metropolises]
Last year there were 23 such deaths, according to the website, and three of them were in Florida.
Last week, a 3-year-old boy died after being found unresponsive in a car near the school where his parents work as temperatures neared triple digits in South Florida.
In that case, officers had responded to the 700 block of Northwest 173rd Street in Miami Gardens around 3:47 p.m. "in reference to an unresponsive minor inside a vehicle," according to Miami police detective Gardens Diana Delgado-Gourgue.
“Miami-Dade Fire Rescue transported the victim to a local hospital, where the minor was pronounced dead by medics,” Delgado-Gourgue stated.
The boy was identified as Sholom Tauber, with the Miami-Dade County Medical Examiner listing his cause of death as hyperthermia and manner of death as an "accident."
