A three-year-old boy from the Vigo metropolitan area was alone for six hours this Thursday, sitting in his chair, in a parked car, exposed to the sun. From what he has learned, he was somewhat wrapped up in the coolness of the morning when he left home with his mother. He died of a heat stroke, according to the first hypothesis of an event that has brutally shocked a Galicia not exactly foreign to the black chronicle. In the event, the pain due to the suffering of the child, trapped in the vehicle, with no one who could help him, is combined with the disbelief generated by the initial cause of death, a mistake on the part of the mother, who went to work at her position from the pharmaceutical company Lonza Biologics at 10 a.m., thinking that she had left her son at daycare. It was not until four in the afternoon that what happened was known.
With 20,000 inhabitants and located just 19 kilometers from the Portuguese border, O Porriño is an industrial municipality in the region of Vigo, traditionally famous for its granite quarries and which has had an important center of the chemical industry since the middle of the last century, in the one where Zeltia was developed, today PharmaMar, and the multinational AstraZeneca had a plant. Lonza Biologics, where the mother works, is another multinational, headquartered in Switzerland.
One of the factory employees praised her partner yesterday, while showing her dismay at what happened. The director of the school where the older brother of the deceased child studies commented this Friday with the local authorities, during the concentration of three minutes of silence in front of the town hall, that the parents had no fault. Although there was also some criticism in O Porriño of a mother for forgetting her son in the car, at first it seems that credit is given to the version provided by the father on Thursday, that of his wife’s mistake .
When the father went to pick up the child from the nursery early in the afternoon, he discovered that he was not there, which led his wife to realize his fateful mistake. They were both in a state of shock, her in particular, despite the medical and psychological support. Although the judicial proceedings and the police investigation, with the analysis of the vehicle, have already begun, the parents will still take a few days to declare, after the burial of their son. In the Galician media it is pointed out that it is in principle an accidental case, although we will have to wait for the investigation to progress to have some certainty about an event as terrifying as it is difficult to assimilate.
“When I found out, I felt like there was an earthquake at my feet,” a woman commented this Friday at a concentration a neighbor of O Porriño. The mayor, the popular Alejandro Lorenzo, maintains that “it is time for the people to be united, supporting the family.”
In this line, while decreeing a three-day mourning, the city council suspended the seventh edition of Porrigalia, a massive festival that includes a version of the Olympic games of ancient civilizations, such as that of the castrexos, the inhabitants of the Galician, Roman, Egyptians or Gauls. The mayor explained that, despite the reserves that already existed and the collection of products that the hoteliers had made, it was completely impossible to celebrate a celebration in the midst of the excruciating pain caused by the death of the child left in his car seat.
