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Cops: Daycare owner left child in hot car for 3 hours

An Upper Darby daycare owner is facing criminal charges after leaving a 5-year-old boy in her car for three hours yesterday as temperatures soared in the 90s, according to police.

An Upper Darby daycare owner is facing criminal charges after leaving a 5-year-old boy in her car for three hours yesterday as temperatures soared in to the 90s, according to police.

Upper Darby police Superintendent Michael Chitwood said the boy was unconscious when he was discovered and the child remains in critical condition at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

Norma Davis, 58, of Yeadon, owner of the Family Play Center on Union Street near Baltimore Avenue, allegedly picked up the boy and two other children in her 2002 Buick minivan at the Park Lane School in Darby around 3 p.m.

She drove back to the Family Center and when the boy's mother came to pick the child up at 3 p.m. it was discovered he was not in the building. That's when Davis ran out to her car, Chitwood said.

"In the back seat in extreme serious condition is the 5-year-old," he said. "It was well over 100 degrees in the car and the baby was suffering from extreme dehyrdation and hypothermia."

Chitwood said doctors at CHOP told police that if the boy had been left in the car another half an hour, he would have been dead.

Davis was charged with endangering the welfare of a child and recklessly endangering another person. It's not clear how she managed to bring the other two children she picked up from school in to the daycare, but forgot the third, Chitwood siad.

"It's (a case of) absolutely not paying attention, stupidity and tragic," he said. "Who knows what the condition of the child will be after three hours in that heat."