According to the national organization Kids in Cars, all of the deaths occurred from May through July when temperatures inside the vehicles reached triple digits.
No charges were filed in any of the deaths because it could not be proved that the children were intentionally left in the vehicles, Clark County District Attorney David Roger said.
The cases include:
July 8, 2005 -- Jozia Diaz-Beltran, 16 months, died when her father, whose name has not been released, forgot he had left the child in a sport utility vehicle in Las Vegas.
July 27, 2004 -- Christian Olsen, 3, died at Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center after his mother, Diana, left him in a car for about an hour. The incident occurred in Henderson.
July 29, 2003 -- ShyAnn Raynor, 2, died of hyperthermia after her mother, Latasha Raynor, left her in a car for two hours in Las Vegas.
June 5, 2003 -- Hayden Fish, 7 months, died after being left alone in a hot van in Las Vegas by his father, David Fish, a high school teacher. Fish was supposed to have dropped the infant off at a child care center, but he forgot the boy was in the vehicle.
June 8, 2002 -- Raymond Spinharey, 5, died at University Medical Center. The boy had been playing outside the family home in Las Vegas. After he had not been seen for hours, a family member found him inside a car. The boy's mother, Frances Rivera, was asleep in the house at the time. The case remains under investigation.
June 29, 2001 -- Nicolas Alexander Christensen, 6 months, died of heat stroke in the back seat of a car in Las Vegas. His mother, Eileen Christensen, was at work and called the babysitter to check on the child, only to realize she had accidentally left her baby in her car instead of taking him to the sitter.
May 22, 2001 -- Dallas Nelson, 9 months, died two days after being left in a vehicle in North Las Vegas. His mother, Faun Nelson, forgot about the child after dropping another child off at a house.
It's one of the most basic tenets for any parent: Never leave a child alone in a vehicle for any reason, for any amount of time.
Yet that principle is forgotten or ignored an average of about twice every day in the Las Vegas Valley, and seven local children have died in those situations in the last 4 1/2 years.
So far this year, only one child has died as a result of being left alone in a vehicle in the valley, but emergency personnel were called to another 420 nonfatal cases through Aug. 31, the latest date for which statistics are available.
Advocates for children and others hope that a new state law that takes up where common sense leaves off will reduce that troubling statistic by making it a misdemeanor to intentionally leave children in vehicles. The law took effect Saturday.
A serious, potentially life-threatening situation under any circumstances, the incidence of children being left alone in cars, whether purposely or inadvertently, is particularly dangerous in a desert climate such as Las Vegas', where temperatures inside vehicles can easily climb to 130 degrees.
The dangers are underscored by close calls such as the one Aug. 25, when 17-month-old Brianna Rodriguez was found by family members in the back seat of the family car in front of their home near Pecos and Gowan roads. She was rushed in critical condition to a local hospital. Emergency personnel said she beat the odds with her survival.
Only one month earlier, 16-month-old Jozia Diaz-Beltran died when her father forgot that he had left her in a vehicle in Las Vegas.
Between Jan. 1, 2002, and Aug. 31, the Las Vegas, Clark County and North Las Vegas fire departments, which share a common dispatch office, responded to 2,171 calls about kids locked or left unattended in cars, according to dispatch records. That averages out to more than 1.6 times per day.
"Those numbers are surprising in their magnitude," said Keith Schwer, director of UNLV's Center for Business and Economic Research and the Nevada coordinator of the Kid's Count Survey, which monitors the well-being of the nation's children.
"More than 2,000 incidents in less than four years? I would have guessed that number would be less than that by a factor of 10."
In some cases, children were left in the back seats of cars by parents who forgot that they put them there. In others, children were accidentally locked in cars along with the keys. And then there were the parents who left their children in cars, sometimes with the air conditioner running and doors locked, while they shopped or ran other errands.
Las Vegas Fire & Rescue is called out to cases of children locked in cars about 260 times a year, according to the department's records. The Clark County Fire Department last year responded to 314 such calls, up substantially from the 230-plus calls in each of the previous two years. And North Las Vegas receives about five such calls a month.
Henderson, which had limited available statistical information, averaged seven calls per month in 2004. The more sparsely populated Boulder City averaged only one such rescue every two years, and dispatch records indicate that Laughlin averaged less than two such calls a year.
While the fire department statistics do not differentiate between children accidentally locked in cars or those intentionally left unattended, fire officials say the majority of their responses are to the former.
"This is not a summertime problem -- it's an everyday problem," said Janette Fennell, founder of Kids and Cars, a Kansas-based organization that monitors incidents and lobbied for the new law before the Nevada Legislature.
"In Southern Nevada it is so important because it is so hot and there is no margin for error. Even in the winter the temperature in a locked car can reach 100 degrees there. It is always unsafe to leave a child in a vehicle even if you can see them from the ATM machine or from inside a store."
Her organization says that 174 kids have died this year in incidents involving kids in and around cars in nontraffic fatalities that include children being backed over by cars, children being left unattended in cars in hot weather and children accidentally setting a parked car in motion.
Each year, about one in four of all such fatalities involve children being left unattended in cars, second behind children being run over by cars, which accounts for about nine of every 20 such fatalities, Kids and Cars says.
Fennell, a former Las Vegas resident, said the numbers of incidents are under-reported, not only in Las Vegas but nationwide. Local fire department statistics do not factor in police rescues, locksmith rescues and cases in which parents break windows to rescue their children, she said.
Because of the lack of reliable statistics from government agencies, Fennell's Kids and Cars group has become recognized by media outlets and law enforcement agencies as a primary source for statistical information.
The organization recently got a bill passed in Congress and signed by the president mandating that the government keep track of nontraffic-related auto fatalities, including deaths of children left unattended in cars.
"No one really knows the extent of the problem because there has not been good data for nontraffic, noncrash deaths," Fennell said. "When we get a better accounting system, people are going to be blown away by how frequently kids are being left unattended or locked in cars."
In 2001, the Las Vegas, Clark County and North Las Vegas fire departments responded to a combined 562 calls of children locked in cars. By last year, that number had grown to 626 -- a figure that the three departments are on pace to equal this year.
"That's a 10.7 percent increase from 2002 to 2004, while the local population grew 11.4 percent during that same time," Schwer said. "What this says is we are responding to the problem, but we have not solved the problem."
A few whacks in the pocketbook of people who are caught intentionally leaving children unattended may help reduce those numbers, Fennell said.
"Unfortunately, sometimes you need to pass laws to get people to change their bad behavior," Fennell said.
A new law makes it a misdemeanor to leave a child 7 or younger unsupervised in a vehicle if the weather and other factors "present a significant risk to health and safety" of the youngster. The law also makes it illegal to leave a child that age in a car if the engine is running or if the keys are in the ignition.
The measure provides for a maximum sentence of six months' imprisonment and $1,000 fine per offense, but permits judges to suspend the fine if an offender takes a course on the dangers of leaving a child unattended.
During the last legislative session, concerns were raised over whether people would stop calling fire departments for help after accidentally locking their kids in their vehicles for fear that police also would respond and ticket them.
Clark County District Attorney David Roger said that should not happen because the law exempts those who unintentionally lock children in the vehicle.
But Roger also said that in a case where a parent obviously leaves the child unattended to go into a casino, to shop or for other reasons, child abuse and neglect laws will take precedence over the misdemeanor.
Fennell's organization has long addressed the numerous things that can go wrong when a child is left alone in a car, even for a few minutes. Among the threats are people taking vehicles with the children that had been left alone inside them.
That has happened several times in the valley:
Last May, a car was repossessed from an apartment complex near Cheyenne Avenue and Lamb Boulevard with a 7-month-old child inside. Metro Police said the mother had been loading her car with items from inside her apartment and that the car was not out of her range of view for more than a couple of minutes. The repo man had only gotten a few blocks away when he noticed the child in the car. He called police who then returned the baby to the mother.
Last April, an SUV was stolen with a 1-year-old child inside as the father went into a gas station on Decatur Boulevard. The thief later abandoned the car with the child inside.
In September 1997 a 15-month-old boy was kidnapped in the 1500 block of Charter Street, near Owens and Eastern avenues in North Las Vegas, after the mother got out of the car to pick up one of her other children. She turned around and saw a man get into her vehicle and drive away with the boy inside. About an hour later, the boy was found unharmed wandering a department store parking lot on Las Vegas Boulevard North. He was taken to a hospital, then released to his mother.
"So many things can go wrong," Fennell said. "Children have been killed getting their heads trapped in the power windows while playing with the switches or by putting the car in gear and crashing into walls."
Inventions on the horizon also could lessen the problem -- a system that uses a sensor under the pad of the child car seat and a transmitter on a key chain, for example.
"You get 15 feet away from the car and an alarm goes off to remind you that you forgot your baby in the back seat," Fennell said.
Products using that technology are expected to be available early next year and retail for about $25 to $50, she said.
Her group also has a bill before Congress requiring car manufacturers to install in new vehicles devices to indicate whether a child has been left behind, similar to warning sounds for seat belts, head lights and keys left in the ignition.
"Changes are coming," she said.
Ed Koch can be reached at (702) 259-4090 or at [email protected].