Left: Kathreen Adams. Right: Christopher McLean (Holmes County Sheriff’s Office).
A Florida judge on Wednesday sentenced a 25-year-old woman to nearly two decades behind bars after she and her boyfriend left their 23-month-old daughter locked in a hot car overnight.
Kathreen Adams pleaded guilty to aggravated manslaughter of a child for the 2023 death of her daughter, State Attorney Larry Basford of the 14th Judicial Circuit said in a press release. Adams admitted that she and her boyfriend Christopher McLean were high on methamphetamine when she returned home after midnight May 16, 2023. They left the child, who hasn’t been publicly identified, in the hot car. She was locked inside until they found her some 14 hours later.
She died of hyperthermia with a body temperature of 107 degrees.
Holmes County Circuit Court Judge Russell Roberts sentenced Adams to 18 years in prison. Prosecutors credited Adams for taking responsibility for her actions and assisting investigators in the case against McLean, who received a 22-year sentence.
“Make no mistake, Judge, we agree with the death of this child being horrific, and nothing is going to change that,” Prosecutor Peter Overstreet said during the sentencing hearing. “But the State would not have been able to prosecute this as successfully as it did without Ms. Adams.”
As Law&Crime reported at the time, Holmes County Sheriff John Tate said dispatch first received a 911 call at 3:43 p.m. on the day in question.
The woman on the other end of the line was “disturbed” and “screaming,” and the dispatcher was unable to obtain much information or details about “what was going on,” the sheriff said.
A deputy was then dispatched to perform a welfare check.
“The first deputy arrived on the scene within two minutes,” Tate said during a press conference. “Once he arrived on scene, he was met outside with an individual carrying a baby that was unresponsive. When I say, ‘a baby’, it was a 2-year-old. Immediately the deputy began CPR – started trying to do life-saving measures on the child.”
Soon, EMS personnel arrived, law enforcement said, and the efforts at resuscitation fell to them – but by then it was simply too late.
The baby girl was pronounced dead at 3:59 p.m. Her body temperature at the time was 107 degrees, the sheriff said.
Both parents were immediately taken into custody for questioning, Tate said. Due to the extremely high temperature of the dead child’s body, investigators knew “something wasn’t adding up.”
Eventually, investigators came to the conclusion that the girl had been left in the car, the sheriff said.
Adams was then confronted with that conclusion and said she got off work around midnight the night before, went to the babysitter’s house to pick up her 2-year-old and 4-year-old, and then got home, Tate said. Once she got home, the younger child was asleep so the parent “decided to leave the child in the car and went inside and ultimately fell asleep,” Tate said. The parents either didn’t wake up or didn’t realize they had forgotten about the baby girl until 3:41 p.m. that afternoon — a matter of minutes before the victim was pronounced dead.
The level of cooperation between the parents was different from day 1.
“The mom did confess to leaving the child in the car for about 14 hours,” Tate said. “The dad – we tried to interview him. He was very uncooperative. He [invoked] his rights and did not wish to give us a statement and talk to us at that time.”
