Caught on Tape: Dramatic Moment 5 Women Break Into Car to Rescue 2-Year-Old

The weather Saturday in Merriam, Kansas was “brutally hot,” Johnson County District Attorney Steve Howe, tells Yahoo Parenting. So when a woman spotted a 2-year-old alone, sweltering inside of a locked car baking in the 90-degree sun outside the mall that afternoon, she didn’t hesitate to run and get her help.

STORY: What Happened When Adults Sat in a Hot Car 

The shoe store clerk rushed back into Famous Footwear where she works and got her boss, store manager Sarah Oropeza, who jumped into action to save the trapped little girl, as seen in a stunning cell-phone video filmed by a bystander at the mall and shared on Facebook Saturday.

(Photo: CBSN)

“The windows were totally rolled up, all the doors were locked,“ Oropeza later told KCTV. The toddler was “covered in sweat…She had pulled her hair back and sweat was just dripping.” A mother of two herself, Oropeza and the clerk began screaming for help and looked for something to smash the window to free the girl, left by a couple identified only as her caregivers, who’d gone shopping at a cell phone store in the mall. “I was just praying, ‘Break the window. She is going to die,’” said Oropeza.

STORY: Carrie Underwood Breaks Into Car After Locking 4-Month-Old Inside

A group of four women quickly gathered, called 911 and offered items to help including a screw driver, tire iron, and finally a truck hitch which another woman used to break through the glass. The whole rescue only took about three minutes, but Oropeza estimated the girl had been in the car for about 10 minutes before that. “Her shoes were wet, her socks were wet,” said the mother. “She was so drenched in sweat. I just started crying.”

Sarah Oropeza (Photo: CBSN).

A nurse who was nearby helped the child as soon as she was freed, and soon after an ambulance arrived to tend to the toddler as well.

District Attorney Steve Howe tells Yahoo Parenting that he is still deciding whether to charge the couple who neglected the girl  — ticketed that day for child endangerment — with a child endangerment misdemeanor charge (that carries a sentence of up to 1 year in jail) or aggravated child endangerment, a felony charge. “Right now all I can say is that the case is under review by this office and we should have a decision in the next couple days,” says Howe. “[Children left in hot cars] are very serious cases and it’s been highlighted on numerous occasions that in a short period of time an individual, even a healthy adult, can become under duress in a hot car – kids even more so. It puts the lives of children in jeopardy.”

Applauding the Good Samaritans who rescued the child (whom he reports is currently “physically okay” to his knowledge), he adds, “The amount of time they saved could have been the amount of time it would have taken the child to succumb to the heat. I hope that all of us would take the action that these women took because no amount of time is appropriate for people to leave a small child in a hot car.”

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