A mother told police she had “forgotten her children” while out shopping after her two young sons were found dead in a car parked in their grandmother’s garden during France’s devastating heatwave, with temperatures approaching 40C when the boys suffered fatal cardiac arrests.
The brothers, aged two and four, were discovered by firefighters in Vaucluse, in southern France, after emergency services received a call at around 1.20pm on Monday. A police source told French newspaper Le Parisien that the 33-year-old mother said she had forgotten the children while she had been out shopping. Prosecutors had initially suggested the boys may have climbed into the car without their mother’s knowledge, but the exact circumstances of how they came to be inside remain unclear. The mother has since been taken into the care of emergency services.
A manslaughter investigation has been launched by the Carpentras public prosecutor’s office. Autopsies will be carried out on the bodies on Wednesday to determine the precise cause and circumstances of the deaths. Police said extreme heat was “the leading theory” at this stage. Temperatures inside a sealed car can reach as high as 70C — more than sufficient to prove fatal, particularly for young children, whose smaller bodies make them significantly more vulnerable to extreme heat.
Neighbours described the moment they realised something had gone terribly wrong. Amandine told Le Parisien: “It was the fire engine sirens that made us realise something was wrong. I looked out the window and saw there were lots of vehicles, and the police had blocked the road. We didn’t understand at first, but very quickly information spread that two children had died in horrific circumstances. You can’t imagine something like that happening to such young children.” Another neighbour, Fatima, reflected on the wider lesson of the tragedy. “Some say the children were playing hide-and-seek, others that they were coming back from shopping,” she said. “In any case, it’s terrifying. With this heat, parents really need to be vigilant, focused, and put their phones away, otherwise there will be more tragedies.”
According to witnesses, the mother had recently moved in with her own mother and had enrolled her youngest child in a local daycare in the neighbourhood.
The deaths come as France grapples with a ferocious heatwave. Meteo-France said 49 of the country’s 96 mainland departments were on the highest heat alert, and red weather warnings have been triggered across the country, with some 1,350 schools closed. The government has warned the public not to cool off in lakes and rivers after 13 people, including a 13-year-old girl, drowned in just 48 hours over the weekend. Forecasters have warned the current heatwave could prove as deadly as the catastrophic 2003 event, which claimed nearly 15,000 lives in France.
