A Tragic Death

Authorities are sorting out the details surrounding the tragic end of Andrew Joseph Johnson, who baked to death in a van several days ago after he was left alone in it by an employee of the Yellow Brick Road Day Care & Learning Center. The employee, Keishawn Whitfield, has been charged with felony child neglect.

Investigators say Whitfield thought he had dropped the toddler off at the day-care center along with other children before returning home and going to sleep. It seems impossible in the abstract to do such a thing -- how could anyone forget a child in a vehicle? But people do -- even parents.

Last year a Portsmouth man left his 2-year-old son in an SUV in the driveway; the boy died from the heat. A man in Northern Virginia left his adopted 21-month-old in the parking lot at work all day; that child, too, died of heat exposure -- and the father nearly went mad from grief. A Cincinnati woman left her 11-month-old daughter in a hot car on the campus of a Christian university for eight hours; the young girl died, too.

Across the U.S., a dozen to two dozen such incidents happen every year. This is not meant to excuse what occurred. The point is merely that even those for whom a child's life is sacred -- the parents -- can make unspeakable mistakes.

When a child-care facility is involved, the temptation is to look for systemic answers: to tighten licensing standards, to impose more stringent regulations, to require more checklists, inspections, and reviews. And yet Yellow Brick Road had been inspected 14 times in the past five years. Aside from some mostly minor violations, the facility had a decent record and had been cleared for license renewal. (Whitfield has had involvement with the court system that might have disqualified him from working at a day-care center, though it ultimately did not.)

The downside of ever-more-stringent regulation is that it imposes ever-higher costs, which could price some parents out of the day-care market entirely. They might then turn to unlicensed centers, or family members or acquaintances. But it is not clear that children are any more safe in those hands.

The great dilemma presented by these isolated incidents may be that no checklist regimen is thorough enough -- and no familial bond is great enough -- to overcome the momentary mental blank spot that permits tragedy to strike.