Dr. Charles Pruitt, an emergency medicine physician at Primary Children's Medical Center, said whether the windows are rolled up or not, a child should never be left alone in a vehicle.

"I, unfortunately, see heat-related injuries and deaths every year," he said. "The temperature in a car can rise very rapidly, within minutes. The temperature can be dangerous in a closed vehicle no matter what month of the year."

Pruitt's specialty is water-related injuries. He said that just as with accidents involving swimming pools, tubs, lakes or streams, the most common excuse he hears from parents who leave their children in the car is they simply forgot or lost track of time.

"The parents or caregiver will often leave a car to run an errand expecting to only be a few minutes. But usually something else occurs and the caregiver gets distracted," he said. "What I hear far too often: 'I was only gone for a few minutes.' Supervision is really one of the most important elements of injury prevention.

"We need constant vigilance on parents' parts, and efforts by doctors and media to remind parents. It is never safe to leave a child alone in a car or around water. Supervision is the key."

Pruitt said it's not safe to leave children alone in a vehicle even if all the windows are rolled down. Carbon monoxide poisoning or other unforeseen accidents might happen, he said.

It would take just minutes for an infant in a small vehicle with the windows rolled up in the summer to suffer heatstroke.

"It's a recipe for disaster," he said.

Since 1998 there have been seven such deaths in Utah. Five of those deaths came in a horrific incident in 1998 when five children who were playing in a vehicle accidentally locked themselves in the trunk on a hot August day.

Nationally, Monday's tragedy was the fourth death of a child left in a hot car this year, according to Jan Null, an adjunct professor of meteorology at San Francisco State University who has done extensive research on hyperthermia deaths of children in vehicles.

With Monday's temperature in Salt Lake City in the high 70s, Null said that would have put the temperature inside the vehicle somewhere in the neighborhood of 120 degrees.

Last year, there were 35 recorded hyperthermia deaths of children left in vehicles across the country, according to Null. The leading excuse of parents or caregivers, according to the study, was that they forgot about their children. In 33 percent of fatal hyperthermia car cases involving children since 1998, the victim was less than 1 year old.

Prior to Monday's tragedy, Utah had not had a fatal car hyperthermia case of a child in at least the past five years, the study said.

There have, however, been close calls.

Last July, a mother left her 7-week-old and 2-year-old girls in the car parked on Main Street in Moab while she shopped. The temperature inside the car that day was estimated to be 170 degrees. The girls were taken to a local hospital and later released.

There have been many more cases in Utah since then of pets being locked in hot cars, including two incidents since 2000 of police K9s dying after being left in service vehicles.

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E-mail: preavy@desnews.com