3-year-old last seen hour and a half before being found dead in car, new report shows

A Richland County Sheriff’s department cruiser sped through the hot Columbia afternoon, lights and sirens blaring, as a deputy in the back seat attempted revive 3-year-old Armani Shoemaker.

Armani had been found inside of a car moments earlier after a missing child was reported to authorities. But the deputy’s efforts were in vain: the child was pronounced dead at a local hospital.

New details released in an incident report by the Richland County Sheriff’s Department describe the fearful and confused scene on Friday when deputies arrived in the northeast Columbia subdivision of Windsor Estates.

Around 1 p.m., deputies arrived at the home on the 1000 block of Parliament Lake Drive following two calls about a missing person. The callers told the 911 dispatch that the 3-year-old had been left at the house. Many of the names, including who made the 911 calls, are redacted from the incident report.

Armani was last seen around 11:30 that morning. She was wearing Pampers diapers, according to the incident report.

By 1 p.m., the sky above Columbia was clear and the temperature was 85 degrees Fahrenheit and rising.

When Deputy Eric Lewis arrived at the scene, he reported seeing a “visibly distressed and crying” woman standing outside of her car parked in the street with the doors open, who was screaming over him about the whereabouts of her child.

Once he was able to get the woman to the front yard, Lewis wrote that he asked her to take deep breaths and help him determine “the absolute last known location of the child.”

Another individual then approached Lewis and showed him that the front door of the home was slightly open. As a Richland County K9 Specialist arrived, Lewis reported that an unnamed person began “screaming at deputies on scene demanding that deputies stop wasting time and begin searching for the child.”

Lewis had just begun canvassing the neighborhood and was less that 300 yards from the house when he heard a deputy request EMS over the radio. Rushing back to the home, Lewis found another deputy attempting to provide lifesaving aid to Armani, who’d been found inside of a red 2016 Kia Forte parked in the driveway of the home.

The incident report does not say who owned the car.

The other deputy, who is only identified in the report by their last name, Simpson, rushed Shoemaker to Lewis’ patrol vehicle and continued to render aid in the rear cabin of the vehicle as Lewis called in a Code 3 — an emergency with lights and sirens.

Lewis noted that the parents “attempted to enter the vehicle,” but no note is made whether they accompanied deputies to the hospital.

The Richland County Coroner’s Office has yet to release a cause or manner of death. The State Media Co. contacted the Richland County Coroner’s Office Monday afternoon. But children dying by heatstroke in cars remains a concern nationally. Last August, a 16-month-old girl died after being left in a car outside of a Charleston-area high school. No criminal charges were filed in that case.

In September 2021, identical twin brothers Brayden and Brycen McDaniel died after their father left the 20-month-old-toddlers in a car. Their father, who had forgotten to drop off the children at day care in the morning and went to work, was cleared of wrongdoing in their deaths following an investigation by the Richland County Sheriff’s Department.

“He didn’t mean to do it,” Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott said at the time. “He’s going to have to live with that the rest of his life.”

In 2023, 29 children died of heatstroke inside of vehicles in the U.S., according to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration. When outside temperatures are 80 degrees, the inside temperature of a car can reach over 120 degrees Farenheit in under an hour, according to NoHeatStroke.org.

Children suffer heat stroke when their body temperatures reach 104 degrees, and they can die at 107 degrees, according to the NHTSA.

Over half of the children who die in cars are left there when a parent or caregiver forgets them, according to the NHTSA.