She does it now, though, because she hopes to save another baby from the same accident that cost her son’s life. “That June 22, 2018, I received a call at the end of the day from my child’s father, who told me to come urgently to meet him at kindergarten,” he recalls. “And I understood something wrong from his voice [had] happened “. That day, Perlot’s partner then forgot to leave his six-month-old baby, Cassius, in daycare. Instead, he left their daughter at school and went straight to work, parking their SUV on a paid plot and leaving Cassius tied to his car seat all day. The baby boy died of overheating, repeating a tragedy that happens about once a year in Canada, and Perlot says everything can be avoided. “There are so many technical applications and things developing today,” he told CTV News. “And if we can not forget our phone when we get out of the car … ‘Oh, I have my phone or my keys’ – Why can’t we do that with one person?” he said. The Quebec medical examiner who studied Cassius’s death agreed, urging the federal government in its report to follow Italy’s example and impose alarms on child car seats. This type of alarm can detect the presence of a child after the car is parked and make a sound loud enough to alert passersby or make an emergency call to the driver. “It’s a terrible tragedy for a parent and for society as a whole,” wrote forensic pathologist Julie Blondin. “We must equip ourselves with social media to prevent such a catastrophe from happening again.” In addition to such built-in solutions, many parents use more informal techniques such as putting their cell phone in the back seat of the car to make sure they never forget to look in the back seat.
“IT IS REALLY DIFFICULT TO DESCRIBE THE PAIN”
For Perlot, it took all four years to recover, at least to some extent, from the loss of her “perfect baby”, a “gentle baby”, as Cassius described her. The fact that the couple also had an older daughter is what saved her, Perlot said, although at first it was not clear how she would cope. “How will I survive every day without my son?” he wondered at first, he said. “How can I be a mom to my daughter when all I want to do is … cry in bed all day?” This stage lasted for the first “years or two,” he said. While she finally managed to return to work and take over her daughter, her relationship with her ex-partner ended much faster. “I would not have survived if I did not have a child,” he said. “I honestly would have done something terrible to my father, maybe. And maybe that meant I was in jail today.” Without her daughter, “perhaps I could not conceive of something as important as the love I have for her in life, to be able to survive it, because it is really difficult to describe the pain, the loss of faith in life. ” he said. Perlot still has many questions about the events of that day and how the baby’s father could have made such a mistake, she said. “At some point you try to get answers – and you get no answers, neither from my children’s father, nor from the police themselves.” That day, her ex went to daycare after work, arriving around 5:15 p.m., and asked for his son, to be informed by daycare staff that his son had never left. Returning to the car, he found the baby’s lifeless body in the back seat and, despite efforts to resuscitate the baby, was found dead shortly afterwards. Perlot wants to know about her ex-partner’s mental state and the exact schedule of his day, he said. Her efforts to find out if the Crown thought of imposing charges – and why or why not – have come to naught.
LASIS IN MEMORY
The medical examiner found that Cassius’s father was very anxious and extremely tired at the time of his son’s death. It’s such moments, experts told Blondin, that people’s memory can be damaged, especially when it comes to their short-term memories. “In times of stress, a stress hormone is produced that affects general memory,” Blondin, a neuroscientist, Sonia Lupien, said in her latest forensic report. “In times of stress, often all that is left is procedural memory – for example, the memory of habits.” This is the kind of long-term memory that allows people to go to the grocery store, ride a bike or commute to work when they do not remember doing so, as they have done this routine so often. For example, it is difficult to learn to ski, but once you learn to do it, you can lift the skis 20 years later and your brain will have retained “the memory of the process associated with the skiing event”. wrote Blondin. In the case of baby Cassius, he had just been introduced to a daycare routine and only went there two or three times a week, so the removal routine did not fit into his father’s routine of going to work. found the medical examiner. Otherwise, he would probably have left the baby during the movement, even with an almost autopilot, and would hardly have thought about either of the two tasks, the medical examiner wrote. It was ruled out that the death was accidental and also concluded that with parents of young children, who are often tired and struggling with work-life balance, it is crucial to develop mechanisms to prevent these memory deficits. Cassius Kindergarten never contacted his parents to say he was absent because he was on a part-time program, he said, and that is something that needs to be reconsidered across the province. Unlike schools, Quebec daycare centers do not require parents to communicate when their children are away – it is more of an invitation to do so, Blondin wrote. This also means that daycare centers do not always call for check-in when children do not show up. Her report recommended changing this system as a way to protect the safety of children. Perlot, who describes herself as a “mother of two”, says she is a different person now than she was four years ago or even two years ago after the mourning process changed her so much. Now she is trying to be able to be happy without feeling guilty about it, something she knows her surviving child needs, she said. But for the last four years, “when I was having a good time with my daughter, there was always a missing person,” he said. “And you can not get away from it.”
