Fatal pediatric hyperthermia: A forensic review.

ABSTRACT

This paper examines a pediatric hyperthermia homicide in which the decedent was placed into a room with only a diaper on and left unattended overnight. There were no furnishings in the room except for a 1500-W space heater and a stroller. The following morning, emergency personnel were summoned to the residence. A caretaker said the decedent was playing normally 5 min before making the 911 call. The decedent's initial rectal temperature was 42.2°C. Law enforcement asked how long the child had to be exposed to a high temperature in order to induce fatal hyperthermia in an empty bedroom. The scene was reconstructed using the child's residence and the same heater. Environmental data were gathered over a 16-h period. The thermal parameters of the room and environment were analyzed using a lumped-element thermal model. These parameters were then fed into an adapted Gagge's two-node model of human thermal regulation, which provided a time-window of exposure necessary to elicit hyperthermia, which in this case, depending on certain variables, ranged from 45 min to 4 h.