Tragedy In Alabama: Toddler Dies In Hot Car Under State Care
Birmingham Tragedy: 3-Year-Old Perishes After Being Dropped Off in a Hot Car by a Contract DHR Employee Three-year-old Ke’Torrius “KJ” Starkes Jr. of Bessemer was discovered unconscious in a hot car on Pine Tree Drive in Birmingham on June 22. Birmingham police said he had been left inside after 12:30 PM until 5:30 PM.
That day’s high was 96°F, and the car’s interior was probably warmer than 150°F. At 6:03 PM, KJ was declared deceased. Because of worries about drug use in his home, KJ was temporarily placed in the custody of Alabama’s Department of Human Resources (DHR).
He was picked up from daycare that morning to accompany his father to a DHR office for a supervised visit. After the visit, the Covenant Services Inc. contracted worker in charge of KJ allegedly went on personal errands, stopping for food and at a smoke shop, before dropping the child off in the car outside their house.
“This is a devastating and avoidable tragedy,” said Courtney French, the family’s lawyer. “He was let down by the very system that was supposed to protect him.” Brittney Debruce, KJ’s foster parent and aunt, went to pick him up and reported him missing. She and the responding officers later found him in the car.
DHR verified that the employee had been fired by the contracted provider that was responsible for the child at the time. The agency declined to comment further due to confidentiality laws. The employee has reportedly cooperated with investigators, according to Birmingham police. The investigation is still ongoing, but no charges have been brought as of yet.
KJ’s body has been returned to his family following an autopsy. The date of his funeral is set for Saturday, August 2.
Anyone Could Forget a Kid in a Hot Car, Research Shows
Most hot car deaths don’t happen because of negligence. They’re the result of a common memory failure that can lead to tragic consequences. Here’s what parents need to know.
No parent thinks they’d forget their child in a hot car. But the tragic truth is that it can happen to anyone.
Since 1998, about 1,024 children have died in hot cars—and more than half of them were left behind unknowingly by their caregiver, according to NoHeatStroke.org. There have already been 14 hot car deaths among children in 2025 so far, with eight occurring in June alone, the organization says.
But recent research highlights that the daily stresses parents face can make these memory lapses more likely. Forgetting a child isn’t a negligence problem but a working memory problem, says David Diamond, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Diamond, a leading expert in cognitive neuroscience, has studied the role of memory in such tragedies.
“The most common response is that only bad or negligent parents forget kids in cars,” Diamond says. “It’s a matter of circumstances. It can happen to everyone.”
During the summer, many families change their daily routines because of vacations or other reasons, and that disruption is a common factor in these tragic incidents, Diamond’s research has found.
Janette Fennell, founder and president of Kids and Car Safety, a group that tracks these incidents, says, “The worst thing any parent or caregiver can ever do is to think that something like this could never happen to them or someone in their family.”
These tragedies occur at an alarming rate, and they involve a range of circumstances. NoHeatStroke.org reports that deaths have spanned from 5-day-old babies to 14-year-olds. And deaths from heatstroke can happen any time of year, even as early as February and as late as November.
Kids and Car Safety’s heatstroke fact sheet (PDF) highlights that caregivers involved in these incidents come from many walks of life. They include teachers, dentists, social workers, law enforcement officers, nurses, clergymen, military officers, and even a rocket scientist. These tragic cases can happen to anyone, regardless of their education or socioeconomic status.
And it’s not just a summertime problem. Even on days with mild temperatures, the heat inside a closed vehicle can reach dangerous levels within an hour, posing major health risks to small children or pets left inside, Consumer Reports’ testing shows.