It’s been almost three months since two-year-old Mariana Hemingway died, and the impact on Innisfail’s Catholic community is lasting.
Many have struggled to come to terms with not only the death of the toddler but the way in which she died.
On November 25 last year, Jason Hemingway, a Cassowary Coast Regional Council employee, parked his car outside his workplace and shut the driver’s side door behind him, unaware his daughter was still inside, trapped in stifling Far North Queensland heat.
It’s unclear how long Mariana was in the car – police said then it was “quite some time” – but by the time she was found at 1pm, the two-year-old was unresponsive. She couldn’t be revived.
Jason Hemingway and Yoanywe Diaz’s daughter, Mariana Hemingway, died after being left in the car outside her father’s workplace in Innisfail last November. Neither Hemingway nor Diaz is accused of any wrongdoing in relation to her death.
“It’s just a tragic thing,” says Father Kerry Crowley, the priest at the Mother of Good Counsel Parish in Innisfail, where Hemingway and Mariana’s mother, Yoanywe Diaz, are devout members of the Catholic community.
Crowley, like many community members, has struggled to comprehend the loss of Mariana, who he says was coming into her own when she died.
Hemingway and Diaz, who are not accused of any wrongdoing, held a funeral for Mariana that filled their church to capacity.
Some weeks, Hemingway and Diaz visit their daughter’s grave daily, Crowley says.
Queensland Police declined to comment on its ongoing investigation into Mariana’s death, which neither Hemingway nor Diaz has been charged over.
Mariana is one of several children in Australia in the past decade who have died in strikingly similar circumstances after being unintentionally left in a car by their parents.
But rather than bad parenting or negligence, experts believe the deaths are caused by a neurobiological phenomenon called fatal distraction.
Referred to in the United States as “forgotten baby syndrome”, fatal distraction occurs after what Professor Matthew Mundy, memory expert at Torrens University Australia, describes as a perfect storm of factors that leads a parent to forget their child is in the car.
“It’s a series of coincidences that then can culminate in someone not remembering,” Mundy says.
Just over a fortnight ago, Sydney father Etienne Ancelet made the same fatal mistake as Jason Hemingway when he left his one-year-old daughter, Olivia, in the back of the car.
Believing he’d dropped Olivia at childcare on the morning of February 4, Ancelet did not discover his daughter’s lifeless body until just after 5.30pm when he went to collect her from the centre.
One-year-old Olivia Ancelet died after being left in the car by her father, Etienne, on February 4. He has not been charged over her death.
“I killed my daughter,” Ancelet screamed as he tried desperately to revive Olivia.
Soon after, NSW Police Superintendent Christine McDonald described Olivia’s death as an absolute tragedy that she, as a mother herself, couldn’t imagine experiencing.
But it was a situation, she added, that so many parents could put themselves in.
Ancelet, and Olivia’s mother, Kim Visconti, declined to be interviewed for this story. Neither has been charged nor are they accused of any wrongdoing.
NSW Police declined to comment on the active investigation into Olivia’s death.
Simply forgetting a child is an explanation rarely accepted by parents who have not made the same fatal mistake.
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“That can be really hard to get through to people because they are good parents, and they do love their kids, and they couldn’t possibly imagine forgetting their children,” Mundy says. “It can happen to everyone.”
What happens when parents forget their children, Mundy says, is no different to leaving your keys behind on the way out the door.
“Your brain doesn’t care at that point – it’s just a piece of information that it’s forgotten,” Mundy says.
“The neurons in your brain that aren’t doing what we want them to do in the moment of remembering or forgetting. That has nothing to do, in this context, with how much you love your kids.”
What happens when a child is forgotten, Mundy says, involves an old part of the brain, the basal ganglia, and a much newer part, the prefrontal cortex.
The basal ganglia, in the centre of the brain, is responsible for learning and storing habits such as getting dressed and brushing your teeth.
The prefrontal cortex, at the front of the brain, controls short-term memory and is much more vulnerable to the impacts of external factors.
When a parent is stressed, unwell or tired, the prefrontal cortex suffers first.
“The problem with that is when you’re a parent or a carer, you’re often, say, sleep-deprived, or you’re stressed, or you’re anxious about something,” Mundy says.
A distraction as minor as taking a phone call, making a wrong turn or taking a call can mean an immediate task can then be forgotten.
“Any manner of illness or exhaustion or distraction can reduce the capacity of your short-term memory and reduce its efficiency, so the more distracted, stressed or tired you are, the weaker your short memory is, and the more likely you are to forget something,” Mundy says.
When that happens, the basal ganglia takes over, sending the brain into a sort of autopilot to carry out routines it is familiar with, like driving to work.
Almost always, forgetting a task is inconsequential, Mundy says.
Professor Matthew Mundy says while cases of fatal distraction are rare in Australia, forgetting a child in the car could “happen to everyone”.
“Unless at some point in the remainder of that journey, the child has said something or screamed, or cried, or there’s been some other sort of cue to their presence, it’s quite possible that your habit memory just gets you to the final destination and there’s no reason for you to suspect anything’s gone wrong because your short-term memory has forgotten that one small point,” he says.
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Each time a child dies in circumstances such as this, questions of criminality are quickly raised.
A police investigation, sometimes involving homicide squad detectives investigating foul play, is launched, but the parents involved are seldom charged with a crime.
Professor Julia Quilter, a criminal law expert at the University of Wollongong, says in cases of fatal distraction, a lack of intent to harm a child means a parent could not be held criminally responsible.
“They’re not going to have the relevant intent or the relevant guilty mind to meet [the threshold for] those more serious offences like homicide and those serious assaults,” Quilter says.
Quilter’s view is that in cases of fatal distraction, no punishment could be worse than the guilt of a parent who has killed their child.
One-year-old Noah Zunde died after being left in the car by his mother, Romy Zunde, in 2015. She has not been charged over his death.
“If it really is demonstrated that there’s no ill intent, and it is one of these fatal distraction cases, I don’t see that the criminal law has any role to play,” she says. “I think the family has suffered enough.”
When one-year-old Noah Zunde was fatally left in the car by his mother in regional Victoria, police, considering his death a homicide, launched a criminal investigation. Noah’s mother, Romy Zunde, was not charged with any crime.
More than two years later, then-Victorian coroner Sarah Hinchey said she considered the one-year-old’s death in February 2015 a homicide but did not recommend that Zunde be charged.
“While I am satisfied, on the available evidence, that Noah’s death meets the definition of a homicide, I am not satisfied that an indictable offence has been committed in connection with his death,” Hinchey said.
Almost two years to the day before Olivia Ancelet’s death, three-year-old Aariq Hasan died in nearly identical circumstances.
Aariq Hasan died after being left in the car by his father in 2023.
On February 3, 2023, Aariq’s father, Newaz Hasan, like Ancelet, spent his day in the belief that he had dropped Aariq at his Glenfield childcare centre that morning.
Only when he collected his oldest son from school did he realise his mistake, telling witnesses: “I just forgot.”
Zunde’s mother had a clear memory of taking the one-year-old to childcare when she found him in the car outside.
“I remember being shocked that he was there,” she told the inquest into Noah’s death. “I hadn’t expected him to be.”
Only later did she understand that she had recalled a memory from the day before.
It’s what Mundy calls a false memory – a memory subconsciously created to fill the gap left by a forgotten task, like dropping a child off. In those instances, the hippocampus, where long-term memory is stored in the brain, presents an old memory in place of the forgotten task.
“In some cases, parents, when asked [on] the day, can, in fact, believe that they did drop the child at daycare,” Mundy says.
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Hasan, who declined to be interviewed, and Zunde will probably never be charged over their sons’ deaths, and while investigations into Mariana Hemingway and Olivia Ancelet’s deaths are ongoing, it is unlikely their fathers will be charged either.
Crowley, the Innisfail priest, believes Mariana Hemingway’s death was an “unplanned accident”.
But until the police investigation is finalised, the community is left wrestling with the question of who, if anyone, is to blame for her death.
“It’s a question that we still do ponder,” Crowley says. “It’s a hard road ahead.”
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