Three-year-old Charlotte Jones tragically lost her life after her father accidentally left her in a blisteringly hot car.

She was strapped into her car seat and remained in the vehicle parked on the family's driveway in Arizona, US, for about three hours while temperatures exceeded 98F (36C).

Her father, Scott, had returned home after dropping their other two daughters at school and started his day working from his home office, forgetting Charlotte was still in the car.

Charlotte was not in preschool that week, a change in routine her father did not remember until his wife Angela called him to inquire about their wellbeing hours later.

Angela described to Fox News the moment she realized something was terribly wrong: "All of a sudden I could just hear a panic in his voice."

"I initially thought she had gotten into the pool or something like that and then he was like: 'Oh, my God, I don't think I ever got her out of the car'."

"Then it hit him what was happening and he ran out into the driveway."

In a desperate situation, her husband immediately called the emergency services. Charlotte was quickly taken to a nearby hospital, but she ultimately succumbed to the extreme heat inside the car.

In the wake of this tragedy, Angela is advocating for heightened awareness about the dangers of hot cars, especially as the warmer months approach.

She fondly remembered her daughter, who passed away in September 2019, saying, "She was our sassy one, the funny one, always making funny faces, our little ham. She was just the light in our family, and we are constantly talking about her. We try to honor her memory."

Janette Fennell, the founder of Kids and Car Safety, a group dedicated to collecting data on child hot car deaths and pushing for improved car safety standards, mentioned that the tragic story of Charlotte is not as rare as one might hope.

She has analyzed data on these tragic incidents since 1990 and discovered that approximately 55 percent of child hot car deaths are the result of children being accidentally left in cars.

"In most cases, these are good parents," Fennell noted. "In general, 90 percent of the incidents are good parents and they certainly would never even harm a hair on their [child's] head."

Fennell highlighted that while the instances of children dying from vehicular heatstroke are on the rise, the number of deaths involving children in the front seats of cars has decreased, thanks to the prohibition of front car seats.

Kids and Car Safety has documented at least 1,083 hot car deaths from 1990 to 2023, including 29 deaths last year and 36 in 2022.

Fennell points out that since car seats in the U.S. must be rear-facing, this often prevents drivers from seeing their children in the backseat, which can lead to these heartbreaking accidents.