A Georgia father has been arrested in the deaths of 15-month-old twin girls found in a hot car, after neighbors frantically tried to revive the toddlers with ice packs in a baby pool outside Atlanta, authorities said.
Asa North, 24, of Carrollton was arrested early Friday, local news outlets reported. North is charged with two counts of involuntary manslaughter and two counts of reckless conduct, Carroll County jail records show.
Someone discovered the twins unresponsive in the back seat of an SUV parked in front of a duplex Thursday night, Carrollton police said.
“The neighbors heard some screaming – I guess coming from the father – and saw him running around back with the two children,” Carrollton police Capt. Chris Dobbs told Atlanta television station CBS 46.
Arriving officers found people holding the girls in a nearby baby pool, trying to cool the children off. Some had ice packs.
“Actually one of the neighbors got some ice packs out of the freezer and carried it out there,” Dobbs said.
The twins were taken to a hospital, where they were pronounced dead. Autopsies were expected to be done at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation crime lab, GBI spokesman Scott Dutton said Friday morning.
Police said the mother was in Atlanta at the time.
It wasn’t immediately clear whether North has an attorney who could be contacted for comment.
The six-unit, brick duplex building is on a dead-end street in a modest middle-class neighborhood in the town about 45 miles west of Atlanta.
The front of the building is covered with several TV satellite dishes, and police tape was still in place behind the duplexes Friday morning as some residents left for work and a nurse returned home from an overnight shift. Most of them declined to speak about what had happened.
The deaths of the twin girls come as prosecutors in another metro Atlanta county prepare for the murder trial of Justin Ross Harris, 35. He’s accused of intentionally leaving his toddler son to die in a hot SUV for about seven hours on June 18, 2014.
Harris’ trial was moved to the coastal Georgia city of Brunswick after a judge agreed with defense lawyers that an impartial jury could not be found in the Atlanta area. The trial is expected to begin in September.
Nationwide, the girls who died in Carrollton are the 25th and 26th children to die this year in hot vehicles, more than double the number who had died by this point in the summer during 2015, said Janette Fennell, president and founder of KidsAndCars.org, a group that tracks such deaths each year. By this time last year, 12 children had died in hot cars, Fennell said in an email Thursday night.
The Associated Press contributed to this article
Fry the father.
How can anyone be so dammed stupid?
Put the dumb ass in a HOT CAR for hours and make sure he can not get out. We need to go back to the old ways, a eye for a eye!!!
Stupid is as stupid does,
For any mother or father to have done this is just inconceivable. He should be put in a locked car in the middle of the desert. Let him bake for two or three says. See how he like it.
There has to be something on the baby’s car seat, like a loud siren, or bells that keep ringing, to allerts you, the baby is still in the car…
But for me, I can’t understand how you can forget that your child is in the back seat??? Its sickening…
YOU JUST CAN’T FIX STUPID!
I am really having a hard time with this post. I can’t seem to articulate how this sort of thing could happen over, and over, and over again in our modern day society……….. You would think that anyone with enough intelligents to use a computer or drive a car, would know also how to care for a child….. Evidently not so. Whatever happened to “home ec” in schools?
This situation has been in the news headlines often recently. Maybe this isn’t an accident. Carrollton Police should investigate this Mr. North very vigorously. Maybe this is First degree Murder punishable by death penalty. Georgia has death penalty.
I totally agree with Arthur Hartsock. At this point we need to consider the effects of a hot car common knowledge. I’m sure people would not “forget” their children in a car if murder rather than manslaughter was what they were held accountable for. And penalties must be much more harsh for doing this to defenseless animals as well. Time to start a petition?