A woman from Toledo, Ohio, is facing trouble after leaving her children unattended in a casino’s parking lot. To make matters worse, the two kids were left alone in the extreme winter cold in a car that wasn’t running.
The Woman Left Her Kids in a Freezing Car
On Sunday, the woman, later identified as Shaneja Gamble, 22, parked the car with her children inside on the third floor of the Hollywood Casino Toledo parking lot, officials reported. The car, as mentioned, was not running and was left unlocked.
While there was no mention of how long the children were left alone, the Toledo Police Department noted that the temperature at the time was 26 Fahrenheit/-3 Celsius.
WTVG reported that the children were noticed by a casino security officer who contacted the TPD. The police later arrested the woman, charging her with child endangering – a first-degree misdemeanor in the state.
The woman, according to WTVG, was arrested at around 1:30 on Sunday. She was set to be arraigned on Monday.
Not a Unique Case
This isn’t the first time an adult has left children unattended in a casino’s parking lot. Despite the constant efforts to prevent such incidents and the warnings that this consists a crime, cases have continued to multiply.
In a recent case, the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board placed 17 individuals on its Involuntary Exclusion Lists. Some of these players had left their children in a vehicle while playing for varying periods of time. Despite the PGCB’s Don’t Gamble with Kids campaign, people have continued to commit this common misdemeanor, resulting in over a thousand people getting barred from local properties for similar reasons.
These suspensions followed two earlier cases in the same state, which saw two women leave their children unattended for extended periods of time while gambling.
In September 2024, a baby was found alone in a hotel room at Bally’s Atlantic City by a room attendant. A gun was also left in the room, reports highlighted. The parents, who were visiting Atlantic City were slammed with second-degree child endangerment and gun-related charges.
Negligence Can Be Deadly
While most of these cases end with parents getting excluded from gambling, they can sometimes have deadly consequences. In an unfortunate case from 2022, a gambler left her daughters to die in a parked car on a scorching hot day.
Launice Shanique Battle, 30, from North Carolina, had left her children in a locked hot car while the temperature outside was 95 Fahrenheit/35 Celsius. The two girls, aged 2 and 3, passed away in the back seat of the car while their mother was gambling at Raleigh’s Vegas Style Sweepstakes.
Battle was arrested on the next day and eventually submitted a guilty plea. As a result, the judge decided to approve a reduced prison sentence of between seven and 10+ years.
