Plantation officers and fire rescue crews were called to A World of Discovery Academy in the 7000 block of Northwest Fourth Street shortly after 5:30 p.m. after receiving “a report of a deceased child in a vehicle,” the department said in a statement shared on Monday night.
“Upon arrival, the Plantation Fire Department sadly confirmed that the child was deceased,” the statement said.
The death investigation is ongoing. The police department did not release additional information Tuesday afternoon.
The family-owned academy is a bilingual early childhood education center that offers programs for children ages 3 months to 4 years, according to its website.
Academy director and owner Leslie Novoa told the South Florida Sun Sentinel that she knows the family and the child well. “This is a tragedy that happened to him and to all of us,” he said.
The child was an 18-month-old boy who went to school. An older sibling also attended, Novoa said, and the family had been at the daycare center for six years.
“They are a very loving and caring family,” she said Tuesday morning at the center, which was open, but the atmosphere was somber. Children can be seen playing outside in the back, where an iron fence separates their shady playground from the tree-lined parking lot next door.
Mothers and fathers will take turns bringing the children, Novoa said. The parents had already advised the center that the elder child would not be there on Monday. When no one came with the small child, no one at the center realized that anything was wrong. Typically, Novoa said, the center will reach out to families by the end of the week to make sure every reason for absence is recorded.
Novoa told the South Florida Sun Sentinel that the boy’s father was supposed to drop the boy off at school in the morning, but he forgot it was in the car. The father then went to work and drove to the center that afternoon, she said, believing his child was there.
The child’s father was sure something must have gone wrong when he arrived that afternoon, Novoa said, but he didn’t realize what had happened until he opened his back door to prepare to put the child in his car seat.
“He opened the door, then slammed it shut,” she said. “And he let out this scream.”
Novoa looked back at the boy and told someone to call 911, she said.
At least eight other children have died in hot cars in the U.S. since the beginning of 2026, and three of the nine total cases occurred in Florida, according to the education and public awareness group Kids & Cars.
A 3-year-old boy died after being accidentally left in a car in Hillsborough County on June 20, WTSP-TV reports. In March, an infant in Winter Haven died after being left in a car for an unknown amount of time, Fox 13 Tampa Bay reports.
According to a fact sheet from Kids & Cars, an average of about 40 children die in hot cars each year in the US, or one child every nine days. Most children who die in hot cars are 3 years old or younger. According to the group, nearly half of all children who were inadvertently left in hot cars should have been left in childcare.
Many of these deaths are accidental, and occur when a parent or caregiver is acting out of habit, then forgets that the child is in the car because the child’s presence is not part of their normal routine, according to Amber Rollins, the group’s executive director, who describes the phenomenon as “losing awareness.”
Perhaps they were sharing the responsibility of dropping off the child with the other parent, and went on a day that was not theirs, or perhaps they dropped off their older child earlier than they normally would on another day. If the child is calm and in a rear-facing car seat, the driver may not notice his or her child in the back, Rollins said.
Dr. David Diamond, a neuroscientist at the University of South Florida, said the problem of forgetting arises from a conflict between two different memory systems operating in different parts of the brain. One is an “autopilot system” that allows people to do things without consciously thinking about them, such as driving to work or throwing a basketball. The second is the conscious memory system, which allows people to pay attention to details.
“The autopilot system can actually turn off the conscious memory system,” Diamond said. “…It’s the autopilot system that takes us straight from work to home, and the conscious memory system that says ‘Today I need to stop at the store and pick up my medicine.’ These two systems are competing.
Stress, lack of sleep or other factors can increase the likelihood that a parent’s autopilot system goes out of whack, Diamond said. Meanwhile, temperatures inside cars can reach 125 degrees within minutes, even with the windows cracked, and children overheat five times faster than adults. These factors create a “perfect storm” that could result in the child’s death, Rollins said.
Both Rollins and Diamond recommend safety measures that will help parents prevent their children from forgetting, such as always checking the back seat whenever a child is in the car or placing a child’s toy in the front seat as a reminder.
Some cars also have technology that alerts drivers to the presence of a child inside the car, but much of it is inadequate, Rollins said.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration was supposed to issue a rule in 2023 requiring the auto industry to include technology in all vehicles to alert drivers about the presence of a child in the car, Rollins said, but the agency has not done so yet.
Both Diamond and Rollins have advocated for decriminalization of parents who leave their children in hot cars when there is no evidence that the parents knew what they were doing or that other factors such as substance abuse were involved. Still, parents are facing charges ranging from negligence to manslaughter and manslaughter, said Diamond, who often serves as a defense expert witness in such cases. Florida is particularly harsh when it comes to prosecuting parents or caregivers, Rollins said.
Most parents don’t assume they’ll forget their kids in the car, Rollins said, but she’s worked to dispute that notion, saying it makes parents less vigilant about their kids.
Elizabeth Morales, a 58-year-old mother of four who lives in Sunrise, told the Sun Sentinel that she has twice forgotten her children in the car, but realized the tragedy before it happened.
He recalled, this happened for the first time in 1999. She picked up her 10-month-old daughter from daycare, parked and drove to her house, not remembering that her daughter was in the car. In fact, she had forgotten that she had raised her and thought that her daughter’s father had done it. Morales said she didn’t remember she was in the car until they asked her where her daughter was. Luckily, she was only in the car for a few minutes.
Another time, Morales was supposed to drop off her 2-year-old daughter at daycare, she said, but she forgot she was in the car and drove to work. She was distraught due to work stress and divorce. She didn’t remember the girl was in the car until her daughter raised an alarm and she made a U-turn to go back to the daycare.
“It wasn’t anything malicious,” Morales said. “You do everything normal, but your brain is focused on some other routine. This can happen; I am a witness to the fact that it can happen.”
Rollins herself recalled one day in the middle of summer when she was taking her son to daycare, which he had started that same week. By that time, she had been researching the dangers of leaving children in hot cars for years.
She reached a stop sign, and her habit memory activated, causing her to drive toward her daughter’s friend’s house without dropping her off. She was halfway home when her son screamed in the back seat, reminding her he was there. She jumped out of the car and started crying loudly, she said, as she realized what was about to happen.
“Every parent who has ever been in charge of their child’s transportation has had this happen to them, they’ve lost awareness,” he said. “But they don’t realize it, they don’t connect the dots and say ‘Oh, that’s why hot car deaths happen.’ Because anyone else in that situation would probably just go about their day saying ‘oh what an idiot, oh what am I doing, oh mother brain.’ What they don’t realize is that by leaving their child in the car, they were making the sound of a small dinosaur screaming.”
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