IMPD: Parents arrested after 4 kids left in hot van

INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) - A mother and father could face neglect charges after police said they left four children in a hot van Thursday afternoon.

Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department officials said the children ranged in age from 3 months old to 5 years old. Temperatures reached into the mid-90s Thursday afternoon.

A witness to this didn’t want to use her name, but told us she saw “not one, but four kids in the vehicle.”

She said she saw the van parked in a parking lot of a strip mall, outside Crescent Market, with the kids inside.

“I was shaking, not knowing what to do. I wanted to break the window and get the kids out,” she added. “They were screaming.”

Ahmad Aburumman says he knows where the parents were: he saw them grocery shopping inside his store.

“Crazy, how you leave your kids, by themselves. It’s hot… you lock the door, you lock the windows?” added Ahmad Aburumman, owner of Crescent Market.            

Aburumman says he ran outside and felt the heat pouring from the car when they opened the door.

 “It’s so hot, you see the water coming from his face,” He described the children sweating inside. “They were crying, you know, saying, ‘Mom, dad.’”

Police said they didn’t know how the long the kids were in the car. Witnesses told 24-Hour News 8 they were in the car between 20 minutes to an hour.

Both the parents came outside and got back in the car, and police said when they arrived the car wasn’t in the parking lot. The parents had already driven off.

An officer pulled them over a block away, and found the children sweating profusely inside.

They were taken to IU Health West with non-life threatening injuries.

Police say these parents could be facing neglect charges.             

They say it’s important to never leave a child alone inside a hot car, even with the windows cracked.

Temperatures increase inside a car within just a couple minutes. An officer on the scene told us when he checked, the inside of the closed car, with the front window open, was nearly 120-degrees.