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Second baby dies after stressed working mum forgets son is in parked car

1st June 2007







A baby has died after being left in a parked car by his mother in the second such case in a week in Europe.

Teacher Ilse Donckers, 34, forgot to drop off her 11-month-old son Chris at a nursery before she went to work at a school in Baarle-Nassau, Holland - leaving the boy in his baby-seat in the car which she parked at the school on a hot day.

Five hours later fellow teachers noticed the boy' s lifeless body inside the car left on the school car-park and tried in vain to revive him.



" Miss Donckers was very much under pressure as she had to attend a teachers' meeting at 8am before lessons began," one of her colleagues said.

" Perhaps that was why she forgot to put Chris in the creche which is only 100 yards away."

" It' s such a tragedy because Chris was baptised only last Sunday."



The tragedy is a carbon-copy of the death of a five-month old Belgian baby Guy Ranson whose mum left him in the back of her car after she drove to work at a laundry in Halle, near Brussels last week.

He died of dehydration in a stuffy, locked car where the temperatures rose to 35-40 degrees. In the Dutch case police have not revealed the cause of death.



" The hectic pace of modern life is the root cause of both tragedies," said Belgian psychologist Theo Compernolle.

" It' s too much to suppose that a woman can cope with so-called multi-tasking, keeping several balls in the air at the same time.

" The truth is that the brain is not able to cope with both a family' s needs and a responsible job at the same time. The brain can only really focus on one thing at a time."



Chris' s distraught mum was being comforted yesterday by her partner, Jeroen, the boy' s father. The couple were planning to marry on July 7.

Dutch police spokesman Mauro Manfredi said: " This has been a grievous blow for everybody at the school. We regard it as an accident."