A MOTHER who left her two-year-old child strapped in the back of her car for 70 minutes on a hot summer’s day to go shopping has been cleared of wilfully abandoning him.

Police had to be called to smash a window to remove the ‘dripping wet’ child from the black Fiat 500 car as temperatures hit 23C.

A court found her not guilty but told the mother she ‘could have exercised better judgement’.

Prosecutor Deborah Hodges said the child had been left unaccompanied in the car parked in Okehampton while his 40-year-old mum had gone shopping for clothes.

Estate agent Jonathan Mansell, whose office overlooked where she had parked the car, told the court: ‘It was a very hot day, a bright sunny day. The child was awake. He was definitely very hot.

‘His T-shirt was wet and there was sweat on his face. I could not tell if he had been crying. He was not in distress. Someone said you need to see how hot this child was. He was dripping wet.’

He said a group of concerned men tried to get into the car and a police officer smashed a car window to remove the child.

He said the mother returned to the scene and Mr Mansell said she was in a ‘state of shock’.

Miss Hodges said the child had been left unaccompanied and the windows of the car were closed and she said the heat was ‘likely to cause him suffering’.

Exeter Magistrates Court heard the mum – who cannot be named because it will identify her son – had gone shopping in the town and her left her son who was asleep in the back of the car on that summer’s day in July last year. CCTV captured the incident from the time she left her son at 4.39pm until more than an hour later.

PC Martin Evans told the court he arrived and some men were trying to get into the car through the soft top roof.

He said: ‘The child was very still but not crying. The sweat was dripping and running down his face and his hair was plastered to his skull. It was a hot, bright day.’

The constable said when the mother showed up she tried ‘playing it down’ and tried to lessen the time she had been away from the scene. An ambulance was called and the child was taken to hospital in Exeter.

Miss Hodges said: ‘There was no injury fortunately caused by the child being left in the vehicle.’

Dr Anthony Hudson, consultant in emergency medicine, said he examined the boy and ‘had no concerns of physical injury from this incident’. But he said there was potential for heatstroke caused by the greenhouse effect of being in a car.

The mother, who lives in Croydon in Surrey, denied a charge of abandoning her child in a manner likely to cause him unnecessary suffering or injury to health.

She told the court: ‘I had absolutely no intention of leaving him in the car for 70 minutes. I was completely unaware of the time. If he had been awake I would have taken him with me.

‘He conked out, he was absolutely shattered.  If there had been any sort of risk I simply would not have left him.’

The magistrates told the weeping mum they found her actions in leaving her son in a ‘hot closed car’ for over an hour to have been ‘risky’ but ruled she had not wilfully abandoned the child causing him unnecessary suffering.