Baby dies in hot car in Orlando

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ORLANDO — A baby was found dead inside a car Thursday after her father went to pick her up at her day-care and workers there told him she had never arrived, authorities said.

Gabriel Saavedra rushed out to his car at Storybook Nursery School and found his tiny daughter, Kayli, still strapped in her infant seat from that morning, police said.

Emergency workers said the girl, who would have been 5 months old on Saturday, was declared dead on the scene.

Investigators do not know who was supposed to drop the baby off at the day-care center Thursday morning, or how long she was strapped in her seat in the back of the hot car, said Lt. Al Rollins, a sheriff’s spokesman.

Both Saavedra and girlfriend Erica Baker, the girl’s mother, shared the Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera that Saavedra used to pick up his daughter Thursday, Saavedra’s friend, Bruce Pottingill, said.

“He was hysterical,” said Pottingill, 35, who works with Saavedra at his job painting cars. “He loved that baby. He talked about her every day, what she learned, what they did together.”

During the summer, the interior of a car could get so hot that it could kill a person in minutes, Orange County Fire-Rescue spokesman Lt. Frank Raike said.

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