Two young children froze to death in a car that ran out of petrol in extremely cold temperatures.
The kids, aged two and nine, were living with their mother and three siblings in a minivan parked outside of Hollywood Casino Hotel in Greektown, Detroit.
They pulled into a car park around 1am on Monday and ran out of at some point later.
The mother called a friend to take her nine-year-old boy to a hospital after seeing that he was not breathing, Detroit Police Captain Nathan Duda told FOX 2.
While the boy was at the Children’s Hospital of Michigan, the kids’ grandmother saw his two-year-old sister was not breathing and the friend went back to pick her up from Greektown.
Both children were pronounced dead at the hospital, ‘with the early indicator being that they froze to death’, said Duda.
As a father, the police chief said he was ‘very sad’ over the deaths.
‘I just can’t imagine what the family is feeling,’ he said.
‘I wish it hadn’t have happened… This was unnecessary. It didn’t have to happen this way.’
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