HACKENSACK, N.J. – A two-year-old girl is alive thanks to a quick-thinking Costco manager who called police after finding the child locked inside a hot minivan in the parking lot.
The video shows a two-year-old girl sitting inside a parked minivan at a Costco parking lot while her mother finishes shopping. The scared little girl was “sweating profusely” and crying in the car seat, according to WPIX.
One officer used the metal tip at the end of his baton to shatter a window on the passenger side. Another, Sonya Bekier, who has a child of the same age, pulled the crying toddler out. She gave him water and consoled him.
“I obviously was upset being a mother myself,” Bekier told WPIX.
The officers started running the minivan’s license plate to find the parents when the mother, Chaeyoung Lim-Kim, with another child on a shopping cart, walked up with a cart full of groceries.
Bekier: “Is this your kid?”
Mother: “Sorry.”
Bekier: “No ‘sorry!’ She could have died! I’ll hold her. I’ll hold her.”
The mother was arrested and charged with child endangerment and released on her own recognizance. The two-year-old was treated at a local hospital is now in the custody of her father.
