New York couple Juan and Marissa Quattrone Rodriguez are still struggling with grief over their twin babies, Luna and Phoenix, who accidentally died in 2019 after their dad failed to realize that he left them inside a hot car for the whole day.
With anger in her heart, Marissa admitted that she struggled to forgive Juan, who was on suicide watch because of his guilt. Yet they worked through this grief together to emerge as advocates for the Hot Car Act, which is now awaiting approval in Congress.
Marissa said that their life changed after that unfortunate accident as the parents were haunted by the reminders of their dead twin babies. While she left her husband for a few months with their four-year-old son, she also realized that they "grieve in very different ways."
Time passed and Marissa was able to slowly let go of the anger and learned to understand that her husband did not intend to kill their kids. Juan, on the other hand, admitted that he struggles with the loss every single day.
That Fateful Day
In the summer of 2019, Juan drove to work at the James J. Peters VA Medical Center, where he counseled disabled veterans. Luna and Phoenix were at the back of their car seat because it was their dad's turn to bring them to the daycare center.
But the father never did bring the twins. In his mind, however, he thought that he had dropped them off and so proceeded to go to work for the next eight hours. He even called his wife to ask her to pick up the children at the center later that day.
When he got back to his parked car, Juan was horrified to see that his twins were still strapped to their car seat and were foaming in the mouth. By then, it was too late. Luna and Phoenix's organs had already failed as their body temperature hit over 108 degrees.
Juan was temporarily taken into custody for charges of manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide. He entered a plea of guilty but was not sentenced to go to prison.
Following this painful ordeal, Juan and Marissa learned that hot car deaths happen to a lot of families. According to neuroscientist Dr. David Diamond, this incident was not about negligence or foul play but may be tied to a troubling phenomenon that impacts the "habit-based portion of the brain" to circumvent the "thought-based portion of the brain." Such a pattern of "fatal distraction" was highlighted in a feature on The Washington Post about parents who were involved in hot car accidents.
The Hot Car Act
According to the campaign for hot car technology, there have been over 1,000 deaths in 15 years in the U.S. and yet there has been no law mandating car manufacturers to come up with a detection feature that would prevent this tragedy.
In 2001, General Motors explored this technology but have not followed through on their plans. Now, Congress, along with advocates like the Rodriguez couple, are hoping to pass a bill that would finally mandate a sophisticated radar or sensor system in cars, that will not be easy to ignore, to tell the drivers that there is still a human inside. A similar bill is also under deliberation in the Senate.
Meanwhile, Juan and Marissa have been relentlessly writing politicians to ensure that this bill will become a law. Juan said that no family should have to go through this agony and car manufacturers have the capacity to make a mechanism "to protect the most precious."
