Foster mom charged in her child’s hot-car death in Pineville

Pineville police say the foster mother of a year-old child who died after being left inside a hot vehicle last week will be charged with manslaughter.

The Mecklenburg County Medical Examiner’s Office has ruled that the boy died of hyperthermia due to environmental exposure, police said Tuesday.

The police department said it has drawn a criminal warrant charging Dawn Aberson-Vanden Broecke, 42, of Charlotte, with involuntary manslaughter. Broecke is expected to turn herself in to police, the department said, and had cooperated with investigators.

The boy was found in his child seat Thursday in a car parked at the Lowe’s home improvement store in the McMullen Creek Market shopping center on Pineville-Matthews Road, Charlotte Observer news partner WBTV reported last week.

Calls to emergency officials about the baby’s death, released Friday, included one of a Charlotte-Mecklenburg police dispatcher telling Pineville police that a “female caller left her child in a car all day, now stating her child is dead.”

WSOC reported that the boy’s foster mother works in the shopping center and realized the baby was in the car only when she left work for the day.

The baby is the second child to die in a hot car in North Carolina this year and the 38th nationwide, according to the non-profit Kids and Cars child safety organization. Nine-month-old Kaiden Logan died in a hot car in Winston-Salem on May 2, the organization reported.

This story was originally published September 3, 2019 at 4:48 PM.