A father whose infant twins died in the Bronx last summer after he left them in an overheated car while he went to work will avoid prison after pleading guilty on Tuesday to two misdemeanor charges, officials said.
The father, Juan Rodriguez, was initially charged with manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide after being arrested in the deaths of the 1-year-old twins, Luna and Phoenix, last July.
Darcel D. Clark, the Bronx district attorney, ultimately did not seek an indictment on those charges. On Tuesday, she said that Mr. Rodriguez had pleaded guilty to two counts of reckless endangerment in the case.
“These babies suffered horribly and we owed them a thorough investigation,” Ms. Clark said in a statement announcing the plea. “This was a tragic, unfortunate incident.”
Mr. Rodriguez, who has been free on bail since his arrest, entered his plea via video before Judge Jeffrey Rosenblueth in Bronx Criminal Court, and was sentenced to a one-year conditional discharge.
Joey Jackson, Mr. Rodriguez’s lawyer, said in a statement that the plea was a “just and appropriate resolution” to the case and that his client had agreed to it “so that he can move on with his life and get this behind him.”
“Mr. Rodriguez and his family continue to heal and work toward the day where all children can be made safer in hot cars,” Mr. Jackson said.
On the day the twins died, Mr. Rodriguez, a 39-year-old Army veteran, left his home in New City, N.Y., for his job as a social worker at the James J. Peters VA Medical Center in the Bronx. His son Tristan, who was 4 at the time, was also in the car.
Mr. Rodriguez dropped the older child at a day care center before continuing on to work, the police said. In the process, he told the police, he forgot to drop the twins off at their day care center.
After arriving at the hospital, where he counseled disabled veterans, he went inside, forgetting that the children were still in the car, the police said. He returned to his car at the end of the workday and drove a short distance before realizing the twins were in the back seat and appeared lifeless, he told the police.
At that point, the police said, Mr. Rodriguez jumped from his car and screamed, alerting a passer-by who called emergency services. The children were pronounced dead at the scene.
“I assumed I had dropped them off at day care before I went to work,” he said, according to court documents. “I blanked out. My babies are dead. I killed my babies.”
The temperature outside the car reached 86 degrees that day. By the time the twins were found, their body temperature had reached 108 degrees, causing their organs to fail after several hours in the car, according to the medical examiner’s office.
After her husband was arrested, Ms. Rodriguez pleaded for the authorities to treat him with leniency. She called the twins’ deaths “my absolute worst nightmare.”
“Though I am hurting more than I ever imagined possible, I still love my husband,” Ms. Rodriguez wrote in a statement. “He is a good person and great father and I know he would’ve never done anything to hurt our children intentionally.”
Struggling to come to terms with what he had done, Mr. Rodriguez contacted a psychology professor in Florida who studies why otherwise loving parents forget their children in cars.
“He thought he was the only person who had ever done this,” the professor, David Diamond, said in an interview last summer.
Since 1988, Professor Diamond said, about 440 children in the United States had died of heatstroke after being left in cars, mostly because of what he described as memory lapses.
Last year, 53 children in the United States died of heatstroke in hot cars, according to KidsAndCars.org, an organization that tracks such deaths.
How prosecutors handle such cases varies. Since 1990, about 43 percent of caregivers responsible for children who died after being left in hot cars have not faced criminal charges, according to KidsAndCars.org.
Prosecutors are more likely to pursue criminal charges if they can prove a caregiver left a child in a car on purpose, to run an errand for example.
Ms. Clark, the district attorney, used the announcement of Mr. Rodriguez’s plea to remind parents and others to be mindful of who is in the car with them as summer heats up.
“I hope that as the sweltering weather is upon us,” she said, “caregivers will be extra vigilant about children in vehicles.”
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