There is no silver lining to this story. In a heartbreaking turn of events, one Oregon mom had to face manslaughter charges after allegedly forgetting to take her daughter to day care and instead leaving the 21-month-old alone in a hot car all day. When Nicole Engler left work at the end of the day, she was preparing to pick up her daughter, Remington, from day care but instead tragically found her still in her car seat in the sweltering vehicle.
According to KPIC, the mother was arrested after Remy was pronounced dead and charged with "manslaughter in the second degree because, with criminal negligence, she caused the death of her 21 month old daughter by neglect."
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The mom's day started with good intentions.
The day began with the best intentions, the Daily Mail reported, which makes this unthinkable accident even more upsetting. On June 21, 2018, Nicole Engler offered to take her toddler to day care, allowing her husband, Peter Engler, to sleep after a nightshift working as an EMT.
But she never made it to the day care.
Nicole Engler, who worked as a pediatric nurse practitioner at Evergreen Family Medicine, was preoccupied by the upcoming hustle and bustle of a busy day and never made it to her daughter's day care. Instead, she allegedly forgot to make the stop altogether.
In an open letter published by the Daily Mail, Nicole Engler's lawyer, David Terry, said the mom went to and from a coffee shop for lunch with her daughter still in the back seat and even told baristas that her daughter was "having another happy play day at (her day care) Cobb Street."
She didn't find Remy until late in the afternoon.
Nicole Engler only realized her mistake at around 4:30 p.m. that day, meaning her daughter had be left in the car for hours in the 80-degree heat. When she found her, Remy was unresponsive and looked blue.
Nicole Engler rushed her daughter back inside the medical building where she had just finished her shift, and staff performed CPR until an ambulance arrived, according to the Associated Press via the New York Post. Remy later died at Mercy Medical Center, and her mom was taken into custody and brought Douglas County Jail.
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The Englers were devastated.
In his open letter, Terry described how devastating Remy's death had been for his client. The couple had tried to conceive a child for 15 years and wrote that Remy was her mother's "treasure."
Understandably, Nicole Engler was deeply heartbroken.
"After a grueling day," he wrote, "Nicole walked out to her car and saw the lifeless form of her treasure, the child she had tried for 15 years to have, was told she couldn't, and then gave birth to at the age of 38."
Terry described that his client was in police custody, "suicidal and pulling her hair out in clumps in a s*** smeared, padded iso cell in the Douglas County Jail, with screaming schizophrenics on either side."
'She begged to be allowed to take her own life,' he added.
Terry claimed that Nicole Engler suffered from "lapsed memory" loss, a condition which has been used in past cases of children dying from being left in cars.
In a 2016 op-ed for CNN, David Diamond, professor of psychology, molecular pharmacology and physiology and the director of the Neuroscience Collaborative Program and Center for Preclinical and Clinical Research on PTSD at the University of South Florida, wrote that memory lapse causes car deaths more often than one might think.
He has theories on what triggers such lapses.
"Since I began studying forgotten children in cars in 2004, more than 300 additional children have died or suffered brain damage as a result of being left in hot cars," Diamond wrote. He hypothesizes that the problem lies when both long-term (prospective memory) and short-term (habit memory) compete.
He argued that accidents like these happen when a parent's daily routine has changed, such as "a change in how the parent interacted with the child during the drive, such as when a child might have fallen asleep en route; and a lack of a cue, such as a sound or an object associated with the child — for example, a diaper bag in plain view."
Ultimately, the mom was not prosecuted.
Diamond also noted that during the drive "there was a choice point during the drive where the parent could go to day care or to another a destination (usually work or home). At that choice point the parents report having lost awareness that the child was in the car."
Nicole Engler was eventually released on a $50,000 bond her family raised through community funding and have set a separate account in her daughter's name, where proceeds were to go to Oregon's Wildlife Safari.
In October of the same year, prosecutors dismissed the case against Nicole Engler, according to The Oregonian.
