We’ve already written about parents who go shopping and leave their babies in the car on hot days. Doing so is not only irresponsible, but also dangerous. If left too long, the child could suffer heatstroke, faint, or even die.
This happens so often that police officers become alarmed by the situation and search for babies in parking lots on very hot days.
One of those officers is Jason Short of Keene, New Hampshire. He was on duty when he received a call about a baby left alone in a stroller in a Walmart parking lot on a very hot day.
But he never in his mind could have imagined what would happen next.
Jason didn’t hesitate to rush to the scene as soon as he received the call about the baby.
“I got there as soon as I could,” he said in an interview with WMUR. “I don’t know how fast I was going, but it was fast.”
Upon arrival, Jason could clearly see a baby wrapped in a blanket with his feet sticking out of the car windows.
It was a very hot day, and Jason had no idea how long the baby had been there. He broke the window with his baton to rescue him.
Jason carefully lifted the baby out of the car, but he feared he was already dead. He looked inert and was very pale, with a strange skin tone.
A crowd soon gathered, and Jason began performing CPR. An ambulance was called to the scene.
That’s when Jason realized something wasn’t right. He started to feel like something wasn’t right.
That’s when he realized it. What he was holding was, in fact, a lifelike doll, not a baby at all.
The doll’s owner, Carolynne Seiffer, returned from shopping to find a broken car window and a crowd surrounding her $2,000 doll, which she calls Ainsley.
“I’ve been laughed at and embarrassed by all the fuss,” she told WMUR.
According to the Washington Post, Caroline owns about 40 of these lifelike dolls to help her cope with her son’s death. Apparently, these lifelike dolls can serve as a healing process for bereaved parents.
“There’s no telling how people choose to deal with their losses in life,” he says.
Jason was a little embarrassed to realize he had rescued a doll, but says he has no regrets and is mostly relieved it wasn’t a real baby.
“I would never assume it was a doll,” she told WMUR. “I would always assume it was a boy. I would never do anything differently.”
The Keene Police Department paid the $300 needed to fix Caroline’s window.
