Confronted about baby left in car on hot day, dad rolls down window & goes back in bar

[Liberal_in_LA]

Police: Father left baby in car when he was in bar

A Marin County man has been arrested on suspicion of child cruelty for allegedly leaving his baby inside his car while he was in a bar.

The Marin Independent Journal reports that 47-year-old Sergei Andrey Tchelakov was arrested Monday and booked into Marin County Jail. Bail was set at $50,000.

Fairfax police Chief Christopher Morin says witnesses reported the 1-year-old boy was strapped into a car seat with the windows up around 1:40 p.m. near a Fairfax brewery. It was almost 80 degrees outside.

The newspaper says after witnesses confronted the father, he went to the car, rolled the windows down partially and went back inside. That's when witnesses contacted police.


Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/09/06/state/n080017D39.DTL#ixzz1XCe4Wl9v

:wtf:

[MineralMan]

1. Geez...can't a guy get a drink or three in peace?

What's all the uproar about. :sarcasm:

[trumad]

36. I still get a kick about the sarcasm tag.

and how you have to add it. As if....

[leveymg]

38. a lot of people don't get it without visual clues. This thread proves it.

Cheez-itz. G-d help anyone caught at an irony checkpoint and brought before this jury pool.

[Mendocino]

46. So you post a provactive

statement, let it stew for a while, then complain that people take it wrong. What do you really expect?

[Warren DeMontague]

2. Fairfax is a cool, mellow, small town.

I'm not surprised people there noticed and did something about it.

[leveymg]

3. Somehow or other, we all survived our parents and our own adolescent risk-taking.

I'm shocked - "It was almost 80 degrees outside." Shocked, I say. A bar. OMFG, he might have been having a beer.

People are a little too risk-averse and in each others faces these days, for want of being confronted with real dangers in life, or aware of them, I guess.

[Fumesucker]

7. Actually, no we didn't all survive..

I had several people I knew die during adolescent risk taking and more in my daughter's friends.

[REP]

8. Normally, I'd agree but cars can over 100 inside when it's 80 outside; not safe for infants

I'm certainly no baby-hugger, but for fucks sake, people who have them shouldn't subject them to heat prostration in cars. It's one of the more terrible deaths.

[lapislzi]

9. Are you for real?

This person was ingesting alcohol and then planned to get behind the wheel of a motor vehicle with a small child inside. I'd call that a "real danger."

Anything more than one beer and he'd probably be over the legal limit*. And, when is it OK to leave your kid in the car for any extended period, for any reason?

There is so much wrong with your post that I'm having trouble wrapping my head around it. Did you forget the sarcasm tag, maybe?

*Depending on his weight and other factors

[leveymg]

13. I'm from the generation where drunk Dads drove 2-ton cars with no seatbelts & spears on the bumpers.

Nobody thought twice about it. As for sitting for a while in an non-air conditioned car in 80 degree weather, that would have been another Saturday afternoon ride downtown with Dad with a stop at Noel's Liquor Store to stock up for this evening's drunken orgy with the other World War Two and Korean War survivors. Those were guys with bullet scars on their faces and missing fingers.

Wars that kill 80 million other people tend to put life into perspective. We didn't have car seats to be strapped into, and learned early on how to roll down the window.

[lapislzi]

15. Just cause your dad did it and you survived doesn't make it OK.

It shows extremely poor judgment. We have laws to protect people who can't protect themselves. We have laws to protect people from idiots with bad judgment (I'm being kind here and dismissing the idea of criminal intent.)

If you want to be stupid and drink yourself into oblivion, be my guest. Just don't endanger anyone else in the process.

Your War vs Drunkenness is a complete straw man and a false equivalence.

[Warren DeMontague]

19. So the 1 year old baby was supposed to suck it up and maybe roll the window down himself, huh?

Yeah, they're really mollycoddling these fucking kids today, huh.

:eyes:

[leveymg]

34. Let's put it this way, it looks like Mr. Tchelakov may lack the sense to survive to reproduce

in an earlier era. Of course it's stupid and criminal to leave a toddler in a car with the windows rolled up while the father goes into a bar to have another stiff one. That wouldn't have been tolerated in 1961 anymore than today. Sounds like Sergei was probably so vile, obnoxious and unbalanced a drunk that he wouldn't have made it to the advanced childbearing age of 47 in an earlier generation without airbags and medivac.

The point I'm making is that there's a tone of shrill, sanctimonious puritanism in this article and much of the public rhetoric about alcohol, parenting, and a lot of other things these days that's kinda grating. There's no privacy, and ours is neither a tolerant nor a progressive era.

In some ways, the '50s were more enlightened. For one thing, they invented the sexual revolution, recreational drugs, jet travel, space flight, Straight Up Jazz and Motown. Now, that was progress.

[Warren DeMontague]

52. Believe me, I'm all for sex, drugs, jet and space travel, jazz, AND Motown.

leaving a baby in a hot car, though, not so much.

[Liberal_in_LA]

30. men had shorter lives then. Now we have research that links certain activies with death

When I was a kid when stood on the seat while dad drove. no one wore seat belts but we know better now.

[leveymg]

37. War and vodka are two such activities.

They go together.

We had a passenger front restraint in our car. When my Dad braked suddenly, he took his left hand off the wheel and threw his arm across my chest. But, the steering, brakes, and tires weren't very effective anyway in a '56 Plymouth Station Wagon.

Check out the pedestrian pedestrian safety features. The dashboard was even more dangerous:

[bengalherder]

50. Don't make em like they used to.

Gotta remember a lot of these guys survived because you could literally wipe the engine off the car and still have the rest of the damn thing intact. My roomate did that to my plymouth valient and deserved the broken tooth he got.

On edit he went thru 2 telephone poles and a walnut tree. I went to the junkyard to get my stuff and from the passenger compartment on back was untouched. Just no front end....bye, bye. He was drunk.

[lapislzi]

58. Well, when dad was drunk...

how well did that arm reflex thing work? Your reflexes degrade under the influence of alcohol. I remember huddling on the floor of the back seat, praying that my drunken folks would make it home alive.

BTW...left arm? Are you British? Because in a left hand drive car, it's the right arm that flings out and pins you to the seat.

[Jakes Progress]

41. More ignorance.

There once was a generation that believed slavery was a good thing. Do you long for those days too. How about leeches for your out of balance humours? What about debtors prison?

[Lucian]

42. Just because you went through it, and came out alive, doesn't mean someone else will.

And just because they did it that way in the past doesn't make it right.

Good god. :eyes:

[NickB79]

43. And 100 years ago we didn't get vaccines

We didn't use antibiotics, we treated severe burns with fucking BUTTER, we thought cocaine and morphine were perfectly acceptable as children's cold medicine, and we operated on people without anesthesia.

Do you want to defend those actions too? Seriously, just because your father was stupid enough to drive drunk with his child in the car doesn't give the rest of us a free pass to put our children in danger.

WTF?

[NYC Liberal]

49. So because people used to drive drunk with no seatbelts, that makes it ok?

:wtf:

Many people died in the days before seat belts and lax enforcement of DWI laws.

[shanti]

55. check it out

my KW war vet dad used to drive home three sheets to the wind after attending our (thankfully rare) family barbeques. he'd be flying down the freeway, all of us kids huddled in the back seat not saying a word. when he and mom went shopping, we'd all pile in the the plymouth, no seatbelts. when we got to the store, we'd all have to wait in the car by ourselves until they returned. thank god, nothing ever happened, it surely could have. it's a different world now....

[yardwork]

57. It's sad that you had such an abusive home life as a child.

[WI_DEM]

10. So it was ok for him to row the window down a bit and go back in the bar

while leaving a one-year old strapped to a car seat? Almost 80 outside could be considerably hotter inside. Also, what was so important that he couldn't have waited to go to a bar when he didn't have a one-year old with him?

[seabeyond]

12. really? bah haha. how about stealing the baby. 1? how about something happens

and no parent around to help the baby. crying... well hell, half hour, hour of crying, no big deal.

drinking and driving

you really think this is a good idea

[Warren DeMontague]

23. Parent Of The Year finalist.

:o

[RaleighNCDUer]

17. Want to make any guesses how long it take an 80 degree vehicle to

hit 120 degrees?

[left on green only]

39. Especially If The Car's Exterior Paint Is The Color Black.

I foam at the mouth every time I see a pet that has been left in someone's car under the same conditions.

[Warren DeMontague]

18. Holy Fucking Shit. You're not really defending the guy who left a baby strapped in a car and

went in to hang out in a bar???


Seriously?

No. Fucking. Way.

[Occulus]

20. The FUCK is it with the lack of empathy on DU today?

What he did was against the law, Blanche, and for damned good reason!

[Warren DeMontague]

21. Little bastard should have rolled the window down himself, apparently.

Because, you know, we had WWII an' shit.

Unbefuckinglievable.

[seabeyond]

29. lmfao...

that was funny

i love when we agree. you are funny. not so much the many times we dont, lol

[DrunkenBoat]

22. Perhaps you should try sitting strapped in a car in 80 degree weather for an hour & get back to us.

Even with the windows rolled down, that car will go over 80 degrees; and infants don't have fully developed temp regulation mechanisms that adults do.

That was a life-threatening situation and the father was a moron.

[hedgehog]

28. Apparently you are unaware of how hot the interior of a car can get.

Average elapsed time and temperature rise

10 minutes ~ 19 deg F
20 minutes ~ 29 deg F
30 minutes ~ 34 deg F
60 minutes ~ 43 deg F
1 to 2 hours ~ 45-50 deg F

“Cracking” the windows had little effect
Vehicle interior color probably biggest factor
"Parents and other caregivers need to be educated that a vehicle is not a babysitter or play area ... but it can easily become tragedy"

http://ggweather.com/heat/

[uppityperson]

32. Good thing the windows were up or the kid would've died of hypothermia

I know, celsius, thanks for the chart. The inside of a car can get very hot very quickly. Leaving an infant alone in a car with the windows down is a stupid thing to do also.

[hedgehog]

44. Actually - those numbers ore for temperature increase above ambient, in this case 80 degrees.

[Jakes Progress]

40. How ignorant.

You libertarians can take risks with your own life (I'm all for it) but not with a one-year-old.

Your knowledge of physics and morality are both skewed.

[yardwork]

56. If it was 80 degrees outside, it could easily reach well over 100 degrees inside a closed car.

Babies, children, and animals die from being left in cars all the time. It doesn't have to be very hot outside for it to become lethal inside.

[notGaryOldman]

4. Oh, those Russians!

:beer:

[Fumesucker]

5. Well, at least it didn't involve drugs..

I know I'm going to have to add this..

:sarcasm:

[Missy Vixen]

6. I've mentioned this before

The "baby left in a hot car" cases we hear about every summer around the country? I submit that some aren't accidents.

:eyes:

[lapislzi]

11. I'm probably going to take heat for this, but...

I don't think SIDS exists, either, except in very rare instances.

[cally]

14. please do some research on that statement

I know folks who have a child who died of SIDS and it was a tragedy. My own daughter, now 24, was at extreme risk of SIDS and turned blue a few times in the hospital. We had to take classes, have her wear a monitor, and wake up many times during the night when we brought her home. I'm just thankful that she stopped breathing in the hospital as we were being discharged instead of a few hours later when she probably would have died in her crib.

[lapislzi]

25. Sorry, I did not mean to offend.

I completely understand when there are obvious risks. But, sometimes I wonder when these things happen with no warning. Perhaps I've just grown too cynical. Many years ago, it happened to an acquaintance, a young, single mom who hadn't really wanted a child, but abortion was illegal at the time. When the child died, she appeared genuinely distraught, but a part of me always wondered. There have been very public infanticides, and the crime's been around for centuries. I wish that it were not so.

Peace to you.

[cally]

27. I understand your viewpoint

and I agree that infanticide does occur. I just know firsthand that unexpected infant death also occurs. I'm very fortunate that my child did not die and medical help was instantaneously available.

[pipi_k]

45. In 1975 nobody told us

that we weren't supposed to put the baby to sleep on its stomach.

Now we know not to do that.

My daughter died in Feb of 1975 at the age of 3 months. She had been sleeping on her stomach...

It's possible that her lungs might not have been fully developed at birth, as she was born 6 weeks early and weighed just over 4 lbs. There was also the issue of my blood type being O negative and hers being A positive. My body saw her as being an "invader", I guess.


I'm glad your daughter survived. I wouldn't wish that pain on anyone...

[cally]

51. I am so sorry about your daughter

know I was extremely fortunate. When was she borne? I hope your family and friends don't forget to mourn with you that day and other times. By the way, I also put my daughter to sleep on her stomach. We were told to do so they didn't choke. I remember my mother in law telling me that was silly but I ignored her.

[pipi_k]

53. Thank you...she was born

November 13, 1974.

She was supposed to have been born on Christmas. All my children were born early and somewhat small, but she was the earliest and the smallest.

She died Feb 17, 1975.

For years my family just sort of acted like she was never born at all. Probably thinking it was best not to talk about her and upset me. It took over 15 years before I could really mourn her death

[lapislzi]

54. Apologies for insensitive remarks.

I know SIDS does occur, sometimes without warning. I know there are markers that medical professionals and parents watch for. And, I'm not in the judging business. But, when there are NO markers, no warnings, and there are other circumstantial factors...things can get a little murky. Sometimes there's speculation, and people should STFU. Sometimes people need to look a little more closely.

I would love to believe that every child is wanted and cherished, and I truly wish that were the case. Sometimes babies die, and we'll never know why.

I would never wish to malign a parent who's suffered a terrible tragedy. But for every baby whose parents had selfish or ill intent, I hope their consciences torment them forever.

And, isn't that what this thread is about? A selfish parent who left a small child in the car in order to attend to his own "needs?" That's the very definition of selfishness, and the very spirit, if not essence, of infanticide.

[yardwork]

59. I'm so sorry for your loss. It was not your fault.

I was put to sleep on my stomach when I was an infant. I put my baby son to sleep on his stomach, in the early 1990s right before they came out with the new information. My mother recommended that I put him to sleep that way and nobody suggested otherwise.

I'm so sorry for your loss. It was not your fault. It could have happened to anybody.

[Godhumor]

24. My son was born this past April. The night we took him home from the hospital I had to do CPR

When he stopped breathing while nursing. We ended up back in the hospital for another three days for monitoring.

He's almost 5 months now, and he still needs to sleep inclined, without a binky, etc. And I still worry every single day about SIDS.

[lapislzi]

26. Again, my apologies.

I hope your son thrives and grows up healthy and strong.

[Mendocino]

48. Really!

Yes, your gonna get heat. My SIL had a child die from SIDS. Why don't you go ask her if she caused it?

[lapislzi]

60. Already apologized.

And, to you personally, Mendocino. I am sorry for your SIL's loss. I know it happens. I would never accuse anybody of anything. But, sometimes I wonder, especially when I know the circumstances.

Alone, with a screaming baby, ignorant, sleepless, unprepared, unwilling. I know that happens, too. Heck, it's a miracle I'm alive.

[Mendocino]

61. Not accepted.

You don't know the circumstances, not here, not now, not ever!

[lapislzi]

62. That's a little harsh, but whatever.

I bear no ill will to anyone on DU, and if I am misinformed, then that only means I must educate myself.

I am not in the judging business. I'll leave that to you.

Peace to you.

[Fumesucker]

16. Those sorts of incidents have been reported..

But they're pretty rare I think.

You really didn't see the baby in a hot car syndrome nearly as often when car seats could go in the front.

Or before car seats for that matter.

[Broderick]

31. Absolutely no defense of this abhorrent behavior

Luckily the child is ok.

[Whiskeytide]

33. The child is NOT ok...

... unless the courts can change the identity of his/her father. I predict a bumpy upbringing, to put it mildly.

[Broderick]

35. I hear ya

[JVS]

47. LOL!