Dad not charged for son’s death

‘They apparently concluded it was not a crime but an accident,’ Hamilton County District Attorney Bill Cox said Thursday.

A county grand jury opted earlier this week not to indict Robert Reid, 43, on a criminally negligent homicide after his son, Timothy, died May 1.

The boy was strapped in a child safety seat for about seven hours in his father’s 2002 BMW M5 in the parking lot of the family’s business. Police said a test showed the temperature in the car climbed to 142 degrees.

Reid initially was also charged with aggravated child abuse, but Cox earlier asked that charge be dismissed.

The father’s attorney, Jerry Summers, described the child’s death as a ‘tragic accident.’

‘We’ve always contended that this was a case of tragic civil negligence and not criminal negligence,’ he said. ‘He (Reid) in essence has received a harsher punishment than anything they could give him in criminal court, because he lost his son that he loved very much.’

Authorities said Reid dropped off his 12-year-old son and two daughters, ages 10 and 6, at school but forgot to drop off Timothy and left him in the car.

Friends and relatives at Reid’s preliminary court appearance said he was distracted by a conference call he had scheduled at his business.

Court records show Reid repeatedly heard a motion detector sound on the car but reset the alarm and disabled it remotely from his desk after he did not see anyone around the vehicle.

Timothy was unresponsive when his father noticed about 3:20 p.m. that he had left the toddler in the car.

Cox said the grand jury decision ends the case.

‘We can’t proceed without an indictment,’ Cox said. ‘The grand jury apparently looked at the law and looked at the facts and decided it didn’t meet the threshold for probable cause.’

Locally, Jennie Bain Ducker spent nearly 12 years in prison for leaving her two children in a car. The children died of heat exposure. Ducker was released earlier this year.

The Hamilton County Medical Examiner’s Office reported the child’s death was accidental, from exposure to high temperature.