4-Year-Old Chinese Girl Dies After Being Left in Car by Phone-Obsessed Father

This article originally appeared on our sister website, Urban Family Shanghai.

By Yuzhou Hu

A four-year-old girl called Qiqi lost her life after her father left her in the car for approximately nine hours, reports Shine.

The tragedy took place in Hunan Province earlier this week, when the little girl's mother went to pick her daughter up at school at 5pm. She was surprised to learn that Qiqi never made it to the kindergarten that day. Worried about the little girl's safety, the parents started searching for Qiqi, only to find their daughter's lifeless body in their own vehicle.

Qiqi perished from suffocation after being stuck in an extremely hot environment for an exceedingly long time. The mercury rocketed to 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit) that day. The temperature inside the car was even higher.

Qiqi's father, Hu, was the one who drove the girl to the kindergarten. "I received a phone call around 8.46am," confessed Hu. "Then I played on my phone for a while. After I returned home, I just left the car and locked the door. I totally forgot that Qiqi was still in the car."

Image via The Paper

To the astonishment of many, instead of taking responsibility for his own deadly mistake, Hu blamed his daughter's death on the kindergarten. "Why didn't the kindergarten inform us about my daughter's absence?" Hu questioned with fury. "They cost me over RMB10,000 every semester. It's the least they could do."

Without a doubt, Hu's irresponsibility infuriated almost all netizens.

"He's not worthy of being a father at all," commented one netizen on The Paper. "It's better for him to spend the rest of his life with his precious phone."

Meanwhile, some netizens pointed out that nowadays there are a great number of parents who are just like Hu and frequently get distracted by smart phones.

"I've seen such phenomenon lots of times," wrote one netizen. "Parents who have zero interaction with their little ones because their eyes are staring at the screens."

The case has now closed with the kindergarten compensating RMB32,000 to Qiqi's parents out of humanitarianism. 

[Cover image via Pexels]

This article was originally published by our sister magazine Urban Family Shanghai. For more articles like this, visit the Urban Family website, or follow the Urban Family WeChat account (ID: urbanfamilyshanghai).