A Long Island woman was arrested for allegedly leaving her two young sons locked in car while she shopped for groceries in the midst of yesterday's heat wave.
Maria Luongo-Devivo, 49, has been charged with two counts of child endangerment, though luckily both of her sons, who are ages 1 and 5, did not need require any extensive medical attention. A passerby spotted the children sitting in the locked car outside the Meat Farms grocery store in Suffolk County around 3 p.m. yesterday. She alerted a store employee, who called the cops. Luongo-Devivo was inside the store shopping for groceries; authorities say the children had been sitting in the unventilated car for about six minutes.
The children are now in the care of a neighbor, and Luongo-Devivo will be subject to a child protective services investigation. Her husband, Bobby Devivo, says she's a good mother. "I trust my kids to her," he told CBS News. "The kids are fine. It was not the right thing to do, and she knows that now.” Last July, a New Jersey mother was arrested for allegedly leaving her infant in a parked car while she shopped at TJ Maxx; the prevalence of parents leaving children in hot cars, occasionally with fatal results, has been discussed in depth before, and the Washington Post published a Pulitzer Prize-winning piece in 2009 that explored whether or not the horrific, but often accidental act should be considered a crime.
