PUBLIC SAFETY

Couple tormented by tragic oversight

Parents try to overcome guilt after son dies in locked car.

By Tony Plohetski
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, September 20, 2009

Sometime around 4 p.m. that scorching Wednesday in mid-August, Kesen Hu called his wife at home to check in before closing out his workday.

When she didn't answer, he figured she was already on the way to pick up their only child, 18-month-old Daniel, at his nearby day care.

Suddenly, Hu realized that, distracted by a phone call on the way to work, he'd never dropped Daniel off that morning.

Hu pictured his son trapped in the minivan for more than six hours and wanted to vomit. He bolted from his cubicle and sprinted to the parking lot. He prayed.

"God, please don't let this be happening to me," he whispered to himself.

"Please let Daniel be OK."

He got to the building's lobby, raced through the sliding glass doors and prayed again - that maybe a stranger could have seen Daniel earlier in the day, shattered the van's windows and saved him.

As he neared his parking spot, sweating from the 102-degree heat, Hu saw no broken glass. His son was visible through the window. He threw open the van's door.

"I was yelling, 'Daniel, Daniel, Daniel,' " Hu said. "He wasn't moving at all."

He grabbed his phone, called 911 and told the operator Daniel had been in the car all day.

The dispatcher tried to help.

Is he moving? No!

Is he breathing? No!

"I finally told them," Hu said. "'You don't understand. Daniel is dead.'"

***

Since the afternoon of Aug. 12, Hu has tormented himself - hour by hour, minute by minute - to sort through how his life went wrong.

"I constantly think, 'Daniel was sitting in the car, crying, asking for help, but nobody came to get him out,'" Hu said. "When I think about the pain Daniel experienced ..."

He spent the first 48 hours under psychiatric care at Seton Shoal Creek Hospital. He was discharged to help his wife, Jing, get ready for Daniel's funeral.

In his head, Hu retraces every step that morning, almost as if they happened minutes ago. Daniel eating Cheerios for breakfast. Mother and son waving goodbye to each other at the front door. Gently sliding Daniel into his car seat, then making sure he was buckled in safely.

Hu hates himself the most for answering the call on the way to his Northwest Austin office from a company that said the Hus owed money for their electric bill. Hu, 34, had already checked after a previous call and had found their payments up-to-date.

The couple share their story sitting on a living room sofa, sometimes talking about Daniel in the present tense. Usually deeply private, they say they want to tell what happened to remind everyone to be alert for children left alone in cars.

They are both soft-spoken. Kesen Hu stares at the floor, seldom glancing up. Jing Hu frequently sighs.

She blames herself.

She wonders how she could not have asked her husband during a midmorning phone call how Daniel's drop-off at day care had gone. She'd done that all the previous days.

In that call they talked only about their electric bill to again make sure it had been paid, that a banking error hadn't been made.

"I should have asked him," Jing Hu said through tears. "If I would have asked him, he would have remembered. He would have gone back."

The couple also wonder whether they will ever again be able to live in the two-story brick house they bought in the Brushy Creek neighborhood a few months ago.

They only visit there now and haven't spent the night there since Daniel died. They stay with friends instead.

Inside the house, protective gates that once kept Daniel from the stairway are still up. His high chair remains pushed next to the table, and toys are tossed about the living room.

In their culture, the Hus say, the preventable loss of a child can draw shame to parents and an entire family.

They can't bring themselves to tell their parents in China that Daniel is dead.

Instead, the couple loads DVDs of him playing onto their computer when the grandparents call from abroad. They crank up the volume so the relatives a world away can hear the toddler in the background.

***

His last night with his son was like any other.

Kesen Hu had gotten home from his job as a software engineer at PayPal Inc. and spent the evening playing with Daniel and his favorite stuffed animal, a dog that he insisted be tucked in with him every night.

At different points that evening, Hu used the dog in a game of hide-and-seek, and Daniel would giggle each time he found it.

"His smiling face, it was so sweet," Hu said.

Jing Hu remembers sitting on the couch at one point that evening and Daniel crawling behind her, then wrapping his arms around her neck and shoulders. She carted him into a bedroom, and the two grinned and laughed at each other in the mirror.

Daniel was the boy they had wanted.

The couple met in college in China and lived in Canada before moving to Austin in 2006. Kesen Hu was recruited to work for Motorola but got a job with PayPal several months ago.

Jing Hu's first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage, but two months later, she learned she was pregnant with Daniel.

During the next nine months, the couple took parenting classes that taught them how to wrap and bathe their soon-to-arrive baby.

"The first night, I held him the whole night," Kesen Hu said. "I was just so excited."

Daniel stayed home with his mom until about three months ago, when she decided to take some computer science classes at St. Edward's University.

They scouted for day cares and finally settled on taking Daniel to one nearby on West Parmer Lane each Monday, Wednesday and Friday. They said he frequently got sick with mild colds or minor infections, so they often kept him at home on days scheduled for day care. A normal routine had been hard to establish.

On the day Daniel died, Kesen Hu was scheduled to drop his son off.

Before they left, Jing Hu said she waved goodbye to Daniel and watched as her husband put him in the van. She stood at the front door, peering out until they turned at a nearby intersection.

Kesen Hu said he had the radio on; Daniel was particularly quiet that morning.

The two followed their usual route that day, hopping onto RM 620 from their neighborhood, then turning left onto Parmer Lane at the Chevron station.

Hu said that as he neared Parmer Lane and Anderson Mill Road, he got the cell phone call about his power bill.

He thought the caller may work for a fraudulent company - they kept asking for his credit card number - and he said he was frustrated that they'd called again. He'd already asked them not to.

Still on the phone, Hu said he steered the van into the left turn lane and into his office parking lot, instead of going straight, toward Daniel's day care.

He finished the call as he slipped the van into its usual spot about 9:30 a.m., still frustrated but second-guessing the last time he'd paid the bill.

Then he got out, walked inside, flipped his computer on and went to work.

***

About 30 minutes after Hu parked the van, a woman who worked in one of the nearby office buildings saw Daniel, according to police. She went inside and told security guards. Daniel was still alive.

Investigators won't describe the exact series of events. Officials for at least one company, Allied Barton Security, whose guards patrol the office complex, have said their workers are cooperating with detectives.

Police have said the guards took steps to rescue Daniel.

They never found the van among the hundreds of cars.

Unaware of the events outside his office, Kesen Hu spent the day inside, eating lunch in an employee break room with a friend.

Aside from the midmorning call to his wife, they didn't speak again for the rest of the day.

She had been busy doing routine errands and shopping, all the while thinking Daniel was safe at day care.

***

Kesen Hu kept screaming in the parking lot.

Still on the phone with the 911 operator, he could hear all the sirens coming and finally spotted the ambulance.

Police officers pulled him away from Daniel so paramedics could try to revive him.

He sank onto the hot asphalt and thought of his wife. "How could I face her?"

About that time, he looked up. Her car was coming toward him.

Jing Hu had gone to Daniel's day care to pick him up. Workers there told her Daniel had never been dropped off that morning. Frantic, she drove to her husband's office to see the swarm of police cars, firetrucks and an ambulance.

She ran toward them, screaming for Daniel. A paramedic stopped her.

"Ma'am, you don't want to see this," she remembers him telling her.

"Please save my baby! Please save my baby!" she cried.

A few minutes later, the medics came over to the couple and told them what they already knew.

Police officers separated them - a common practice for anyone in any death investigation - and led them to separate patrol cars.

In the back, Hu sobbed. He punched himself in the head.

"I was hating myself," he said. "I felt so guilty. I had no idea why this happened to me and my family."

***

They couldn't face going home that night. Jing Hu stayed with friends while her husband was in the psychiatric hospital.

They returned to their house for the first time that Sunday, four days after Daniel died. The funeral director had suggested they display some of Daniel's favorite toys at the service, so they went to pick some out.

They got a knock on the door while there. A friend who had gone with them opened it to find Williamson County sheriff's deputies, arrest warrant in hand, who asked whether Kesen Hu was in the house. They told Hu he had to come with them.

Prosecutors in Williamson County - the parking lot is in a part of Austin that lies in that county - had charged Hu with endangering a child, a crime for which he could be sent behind bars for two years.

Prosecutors have said that they brought the case against him, in part, to raise public awareness about the dangers of forgetting children in cars. District Attorney John Bradley has since declined to comment.

Alan Bennett, an Austin attorney who is representing Hu, said he is convinced his client is innocent of any crime.

During the arrest, Hu said he tried to be brave, for his wife, who began sobbing on the living room floor. She screamed that Austin police detectives who had interviewed the couple told them Daniel's death was "a tragic accident."

Kesen Hu said he was stunned when the handcuffs snapped on.

"I never expected this to happen," he said. "I had just lost my son."

He spent 48 hours in jail before getting out on bond.

He's since had an initial court appearance - summoned before state District Judge Ken Anderson - and was the first in line among suspected burglars and drug dealers. Before the hearing started, the Hus prayed in the courtroom with a friend.

Anderson took no action on the case that day, other than to remind Hu the standard rules he must follow to be out of jail on bond: no breaking the law, no talking to potential witnesses. He walked out of the courtroom, his head down, his wife beside him in a black dress.

Whatever happens at the courthouse, Hu said he already faces the punishment of a lifetime: agonizing what-ifs.

Friends tell Hu that God forgives, that Daniel is in heaven. They say that he is happy there.

"But I cannot feel that," he said. "I still want Daniel to grow up with me."

The couple is struggling with what's next.

Will they sell their house? Start over in a new city?

"We have to face things," Kesen Hu tells himself. "We have to get back to our normal lives as soon as we can."

Scenarios about his future loop in his head. One he dwells on is prison.

He has confided in a sister everything that has happened. Should he be sent away, he has asked her to meet with their parents and tell them he's sorry. Then he wants her to give them the truth.

What is this? CLOSE

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Ricardo B. Brazziell
AMERICAN-STATESMAN

(enlarge photo)

Jing and Kesen Hu wonder whether they will ever again be able to live in their Brushy Creek house. Since their son died, they have been staying with friends. They have yet to tell their parents in China about Daniel's death.

Ricardo B. Brazziell
AMERICAN-STATESMAN

(enlarge photo)

Daniel was the boy Jing and Kesen Hu had wanted. 'His smiling face, it was so sweet,' Kesen Hu said.

Ricardo B. Brazziell
AMERICAN-STATESMAN

(enlarge photo)

Jing Hu blames herself and Kesen Hu torments himself for their son's death. Friends tell him that Daniel is in heaven. 'But I cannot feel that. I still want Daniel to grow up with me,' he said.

FAMILY PHOTO

(enlarge photo)

Jing and Kesen Hu took parenting classes to prepare them for raising Daniel.

Ricardo B. Brazziell
AMERICAN-STATESMAN

(enlarge photo)

Toys are still tossed about the Hu's home, and Daniel's high chair remains pushed next to the table.