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MELBOURNE, Fla. (WOFL FOX 35) - A 1-year-old boy is dead after suffering some kind of heat-related complications.
Police are investigating, trying to figure out why his mother drove to a fire station and not a hospital.
Officials say parents should learn from this incident about what not to do.
When the mother arrived with her infant, he was having seizures.
Then, the firefighters at Station 71 started working on him, but he died some time later in the hospital.
The team took it hard.
“They did, they were distraught knowing they did everything that they could do, and unfortunately the child did pass,” said Phil Leitz, station chief at the fire house on Eau Gallie Boulevard.
On Thursday, a car pulled up with a mom at the wheel asking for help.
She said her baby, a boy just 14 months old, was in distress. She said she happened to be in this area and the station was the closest place she could get to.
The firefighters put the child on a weight-lifting bench and tried to stabilize him.
The chief says the child was hot. His temperature was more than 100 degrees.
“He was unconscious, unresponsive at the time,” Leitz said.
Firefighters and other first responders will jump into action when something like that shows up on their front door, but the chief says the better thing to do would’ve been to pull over and call 911.
The mother might have gotten to the station to find the garage empty - the fire engines out on a call - and no firemen around.
“So, don’t bring the baby to the station if you don’t have to, or the patient to the station, call 911 and let us come to you, because there’s a good chance with busier stations they are not going to be there,” Leitz said.
The identity of the child and mother have not been released.