'Nobody's coming to help me': Mom accidentally locked baby in car and 911 refused to send police
Lacey Guyton was leaving her grandparents’ home in Waterford, Mich., on Saturday when she put her 2-month-old daughter, Raina, in her car seat for the drive home. She threw the diaper bag inside the car, closed the door, and, while walking toward the driver’s seat, heard the car’s doors “randomly lock.”
The keys were in the diaper bag, and while touching the door’s handle should have unlocked the door, the car remained locked.
According to Guyton’s post on Facebook, she picked up a chunk of asphalt from the ground and attempted to break the passenger window while her grandmother called 911. The dispatcher told the panicked family that the service doesn’t send police to unlock car doors.
The dispatcher “said we have to call a tow company,” Guyton told Fox 2 in Detroit. “I’m like, grandma, we don’t have time to call a tow company. Like, I don’t know how many minutes I have until she’s passing out.”
At this point, Raina was screaming in the hot car. The mother called 911, explained again that her 2-month-old was inside the car, and begged the dispatcher to send a fire rescue crew to smash her car window.
“It was like the worst day of my life,” said Guyton. “I was so, like, shocked, [thinking] they aren’t coming; I have to get her out of here. Nobody’s coming to help me.”
“I decided to at least ask the tow company to come while I kept trying to break a window. I checked on Raina again real quick and saw she stopped crying and was starting to close her eyes and at this point I didn’t know if she was going to sleep or if my baby was dying,” Guyton wrote on Facebook.
After two hard hits, the back windshield broke, and Guyton crawled through to grab her baby. She attempted to unlock the doors with the key fob, but she said she now believes it had malfunctioned. After unlocking the doors manually, she was able to pull Raina out of the car and cool her down. Twelve minutes later, the towing company arrived.
According to Waterford police Chief Scott Underwood, the dispatcher involved has been working in this capacity for years and should have known better. Underwood said that she would be disciplined and trained on how to handle calls like this in the future.
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