A North Carolina man's attempt to raise awareness among parents about what a child might go through if they get locked in a car with sweltering heat suffocating them has gone viral after he uploaded a YouTube video on June 20, which shows Terry Bartley experience the "Hot Car Challenge," ABC News reported. The experiment was motivated by a string of recent "hot car" deaths, including that of 22-month-old Cooper Harris.
As temperatures in North Carolina reach the upper 80s, Bartley's forehead, cheeks and neck drip with sweat while he attempts to sit still in a car with rolled-up windows. "I want to know how it feels to be left in the car, sitting in the back seat, strapped into a car seat with the windows up and doors probably locked," Bartley says in the video clip.
The video comes weeks after a Georgia father was arrested for leaving his son Cooper in a hot SUV car for seven hours on a 90-degree day in a case that has drawn national headlines, Reuters reported. Charged with felony murder and cruelty to a child in the second degree, the father has pleaded not guilty, claiming he left Cooper in the car by accident.
That tragedy motivated Bartley to sit inside his car and start recording, even though, by his own admission in the video, he could "barely breathe." Bartley told ABC News Sunday that the "first ten minutes when I was in the car was just trying to get a glimpse of what it felt like for a child to sit in a car."
"I was losing air, it was like I was sitting in a microwave cooking. I could have easily took my shirt and wiped my face and wringed it out," he added. But Bartley was hoping to "raise awareness for parents to stop leaving their kids in the car unattended."
According to the website kidsandcars.org, this year has witnessed at least 17 children die of heat stroke when left unattended in hot cars.
Meanwhile, Bartley's video, which has been viewed more than 1.3 million times, has inspired others to take the challenge and create their own videos, some of which feature children and dogs. "I was shocked," he told ABC News. "I made a video and I didn't expect that it would get this kind of attention it did. It kind of blew up out of nowhere."
