Baby freed from hot car after Connecticut Good Samaritan calls 911

NORWALK -- A mother is facing charges after she allegedly left her child in a vehicle in a parking garage in Connecticut Wednesday.

The 4-month-old boy was discovered in a back garage at the site, and police say mother left her twice in the same day. It was the quick thinking of an assistant teacher who works at the Children's Corner Learning Center that may have saved the child's life.

Alicia Reid was on her lunch break and making a phone call in her car around noon when she kept hearing the desperate cries of a baby, alerting her that something was not right.

"Why do I still hear the baby?" she said "So something told me to just get up and look in the cars around you...I started to walk to the car that was over here, and I looked through the window, and that's when I saw the baby...all by himself with the windows rolled up, kicking and screaming."

Unable to get into Toyota Land Cruiser, she called her supervisor, who then called Norwalk combined dispatch.

Police and firefighters responded and spent several minutes trying to unlock the vehicle before breaking the window to free the crying baby.

"The baby was definitely hot when I touched her toes," eyewitness Jen Pennucci said. "She wasn't sweaty, but could tell had been crying a while and under distress."

"It's unfortunate what happened, but it was fortunate that she happened to be where she was," Norwalk police Chief Thomas Kulhawik said. "Then they had found out that this was the second time, apparently, that she had gone to the gym that day and left the child twice unattended."

The child's mother, 46-year-old Hiroko Kurihara, who police say was working out in at a gym in the building, arrived and was taken into custody.

She is charged with risk of injury to a child and leaving a child unattended in a car.

Reid, a mother of two, is just happy she could help.

"I am proud of myself for that," she said. "And I just thank God I was there."