Brittany Borgess: Woman Charged After Horrifying Hot Car Death Of Her Boyfriend’s 4-Year-Old Daughter

Brittany Borgess, 28, finds herself under arrest with bail set at $95,000 after police say she left a four-year-old girl locked in a hot car for hours on July 22, as she was at her place of employment in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. With temperatures outside in the high 90s, investigators say that inside the car, the temperature reached well into the triple digits — possibly topping 120 degrees Fahrenheit, according to a report by WNEP TV News in Pennsylvania.

Borgess was arrested on Thursday, about four weeks after the horrifying tragedy that claimed the life of 4-year-old Samaria Motyka — whose core body temperature was recorded at 110 degrees as doctors at Williamsport Medical Center frantically attempted to save her.

Woman is charged in death of boyfriend’s daughter who was left in a hot car for hours https://t.co/RtTQjDTLCm

— Daily Mail US (@DailyMail) August 20, 2016

Burgess dropped two children off safely on that Friday morning in July. Samaria Motyka was reportedly the daughter of the young mom’s boyfriend, William Motkya.

The couple had been living together for approximately three years, according to the PennLive news site, and Brittany Borgess was generally responsible for transporting the three children to school and daycare each morning.

Borgess successfully dropped her 7-year-old daughter at school, then took her 2-year-old son to his regular daycare center. But the mom was running late for work that day, she reportedly told police, and that’s when the terrible problems began.

According to an arrest affidavit filed by Williamsport Bureau of Police Detective Raymond O. Kontz III, Brittany Borgess was supposed to take Samaria to a separate daycare facility in South Williamsport, but distracted by her tardiness to her job that day, drove directly to her place of employment instead, where she rushed inside — leaving the little girl inside the car.

It’s always a tragedy when a child dies in a hot car, but whether or not it’s a crime is up to the prosecutor https://t.co/XubFcpC6pk

— Texas Monthly (@TexasMonthly) August 16, 2016

According to the detective’s affidavit, Borgess admitted that she was often late for work and had “forgotten the kids in the past,” on one occasion driving straight to her job with all three children in the car.

According to her LinkedIn profile, Brittany Borgess is employed as a sales and security administrator at Compu-Gen Technologies in Williamsport.

Upon leaving work at about 3:30 p.m. that day, Borgess returned to her car and saw Samaria still in the back seat, unresponsive. One eyewitness, who responded to the young woman’s cries for help, described the child as “completely soaked and felt like she pulled her out of a swimming pool,” police said.

The following report from NBC’s Today Show details the pervasive and shockingly common problem of children who die from being left inside a hot car.

https://youtu.be/uC0W1vW-koU

The tragedy would be the 28th death of a child this year as a result of being left in a hot car, and according to the parenting site Romper.com, a heartbreaking 755 children died in hot cars from 1990 to 2015. The report said that 55 percent of those children were left in the hot cars by their parents, while 28 percent were children who climbed into cars on their own, only to find themselves trapped inside.

Experts say that while many parents insist that they would never lose track of their children, certainly not to the point of leaving them locked in a hot car, “that’s actually a dangerous mindset that only increases the likelihood of this continuing to happen,” the Romper report said.

RT @coreycarter83
Experts say to leave your cell in back seat, so you don’t forget kids!https://t.co/ipSCjIAifS

— Uvi Poznansky Author (@UviPoznansky) August 20, 2016

According to a Washington Post report on the prevalence of hot car tragedies, the problem cuts across social classes and ethnic groups, and no one is immune from the possibility of a fatal hot car mistake.

“The wealthy do, it turns out. And the poor, and the middle class. Parents of all ages and ethnicities do it. Mothers are just as likely to do it as fathers. It happens to the chronically absent-minded and to the fanatically organized, to the college-educated and to the marginally literate.”

“In the last 10 years, it has happened to a dentist. A postal clerk. A social worker. A police officer. An accountant. A soldier. A paralegal. An electrician. A Protestant clergyman. A rabbinical student. A nurse. A construction worker. An assistant principal. It happened to a mental health counselor, a college professor and a pizza chef. It happened to a pediatrician. It happened to a rocket scientist,” the Post reporter Gene Weingarten wrote in 2009.

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Brittany Borgess now faces charges of involuntary manslaughter, child endangerment, reckless endangerment of a person, and leaving an child unattended in a motor vehicle.

[Photo by iStock]