Mom Left One-Year-Old In Hot Car For Six Hours, While She Got Her Hair Done, Tried To Cover Up Death


A one-year-old girl has died after her mother left her in a hot car for six hours to get her hair done.

According to the Atlanta Journal, Dijanelle Fowler arrived for a hair appointment at a Georgia salon and left her one-year-old daughter in the car with the air conditioning on. With temperatures hovering over 90 degrees, the infant did not stand a chance in the hot Hyundai car, especially when the air conditioner soon packed up.

The 25-year-old mother did not go back to check her child once within those six hours.

Surveillance footage shows Fowler, a former basketball player parking her car at 10:00 a.m., entering the Mahogany salon at 10:06 a.m. before returning to her vehicle at 4:00 p.m. When Fowler could not start her vehicle, she went back into a salon to get a man to help jump start her car.

Investigators believe that the 25-year-old mother was aware that her child was unconscious if not dead. According to police, Fowler concealed the unresponsive child from the Good Samaritan with a pile of clothes in the backseat. Dijanelle Fowler refused to call 911, instead opting to text Skylar’s godfather and tell him that she was headed to a clinic because she was having a serious headache.

WGRZ reports that Fowler dialed 911 from the parking lot of the Emory University Hospital. In the call, she talked about “having a seizure of some kind.” When officers arrived, they found an “unconscious” Fowler and the one-year-old infant dead in the back seat.

At that time, police believed that the 25-year-old had suffered a seizure and Skylar had died after, while trapped in the vehicle with her mother. However, a medical examiner said the little girl had been dead for much longer. As investigations were going on, Fowler was treated and released from the hospital.

The tragic incident happened on June 15.

By July, police were eventually able to piece together the correct timeline of what actually happened by reviewing surveillance footage and after unearthing Fowler’s Google searches, where she searched for “signs of seizures.” Investigators claim the Skylar was probably already dead when Dijanelle Fowler exited the hair salon six hours later.

With enough to arrest the 25-year-old, police found out that she had skipped town.

Dijanelle Fowler is thought to have traveled to New Jersey, Florida, and South Carolina before handing herself over to authorities on Monday. She has been charged with second-degree cruelty to children, concealing death as well as second-degree murder.

County Police Captain Jerry A. Lewis believes that Fowler did not intentionally mean to harm her daughter which explains why she has been charged with second-degree murder and not first-degree murder. However, the police chief pointed out that there were consequences to be faced.

“I don’t believe it was intentional. It seems that it was an accident. However, with that in mind, there are consequences that come with that.”

Dijanelle Fowler had only been living in the Atlanta area for a few months before her daughter’s demise. She is currently being held without bond in a county jail.

[Featured Image by Kurmyshov/Thinkstock]

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