‘She must have just been asleep:’ Deputies say Ellenton man tried to coverup hot car death
BRADENTON, Fla. - 24-year-old Markise Outing of Ellenton faces a charge of aggravated manslaughter for the death of his girlfriend’s daughter.
"He was not honest with us from the beginning. He continued to lie," said Randy Warren with the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office.
Outing brought the 6-year-old girl to Southern Manatee Fire Rescue, paramedics noted she was already unconscious and not breathing. Outing told deputies she had gotten overheated from playing outside in a park, but they would soon learn that wasn’t the truth.
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"These paramedics did everything they could to try and revive this 6-year-old child. She was taken to a hospital and unfortunately died not too long after that," said Warren.
According to Manatee County deputies, the girl’s body core temperature was recorded at 107 degrees.
Courtesy: Manatee County Sheriff's Office
Outing’s story that the girl got overheated while playing outside didn’t add up to investigators, who began looking at other possible causes, including whether the girl was left in a hot car.
"These types of investigations require some science. They get in, try to figure out what the temperature would be, running a vehicle for a while without the ac on and starting to notice as it gets hot. We pulled cellphone data. We were able to put him at that location. We looked at surveillance videos, we knew what time he clocked into work and out of work," said Warren.
On May 20, deputies said Outing picked the child up from school and returned to his work off 19th Street Court East in Bradenton and left the girl inside for about two and a half hours.
Temperatures outside rose to 89 degrees; inside the car it rose to 115 degrees.
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Deputies believe the girl was asleep at the time.
"As the temperature rose it turned into an oven and she was just unable to just wake up at this point," said Warren.
Deputies said it takes just minutes for the temperature inside a parked car to rise to dangerous levels and there is no amount of time that is safe to leave a child unattended inside a car.
Manatee deputies say the preliminary reports that the six-year-old died from extreme heat, but they are waiting on additional tests from the medical examiner’s office.