How I forgave my husband for our son’s hot car death

The Fourth of July weekend in 2014 was a whirlwind for the Seitz family. Lindsey Rogers-Seitz’s parents were visiting her family of five in Ridgefield, Conn.

Baby Ben, was 15 months old, playing with balls, sucking on his pacifier, laughing, and showing off those dimpled cheeks, piercing blue eyes and curly blonde hair that caught flickers of radiant sunlight while playing on the beach.

It was the weekend when he uttered his first much-awaited word: mama. Lindsey thought to herself, “We have a good life.” 

Monday morning, July 7, was the return to work and reality.  While prepping in the bathroom, Lindsey looked at her son, declaring, “You’re too pretty to be a boy.”

Her husband, Kyle, was busy feeding Ben his oatmeal and yogurt before changing him out of his green alligator pjs.

The routine was rote for Kyle: Drop off Ben at daycare, grab coffee on Main Street and drive to work at a local engineering firm. 

Lindsey, meanwhile, took a rare personal day from her job as an attorney, to drive the girls, Kaylyn and Riley, then 8 and 5, to vacation Bible school.

She spotted Kyle’s car by the coffee shop on the main drag, thinking to herself that he made record time after daycare drop off. “I see your car,” she texted. All in all, it was a pretty ordinary day.

It was about 5 p.m., when Kyle swung by daycare to pick up Ben, that the Seitz family’s life would change forever.

“Ben’s not here today,” Kyle was told. He was never dropped off. After searching room to room in the building, Kyle ran to the car to discover Ben still strapped into his carseat.

Kyle had forgotten to drop off Ben at daycare. That day, the heat index reached 87 degrees. Ben had been strapped in the sweltering Jeep Cherokee since that morning.

What happened next is recalled in painful detail in Rogers-Seitz’s memoir, “The Gift of Ben” (Wellness Writers Press). It’s a mother’s journey through unimaginable grief, and the strength it took to keep her family together. 

Kyle frantically tried to shake the limp toddler awake before speeding off to the hospital, hitting a car on the way. Ben was declared dead upon arrival.

Lindsey, for her part, was trying to make plans for dinner, texting Kyle to ask if he wanted tacos. “He didn’t text or call back, which wasn’t like him,” she told The Post.

Then the daycare center called Lindsey to alert her that Ben never made it in. “My mind started beating up. I started thinking about every summer when kids are forgotten in hot cars,” she said. “I drove to the police station and had an anxiety attack in the parking lot.”

She walked in asking, “I’m Lindsey Seitz – is there something I need to know about my family?” and was told they would take her to the hospital. Sitting in the back of a police car with a paper bag to her mouth and being told not to rush to conclusions, Lindsey felt a mother’s instinct about the fate of her precious son.

After she arrived at the hospital and was ushered into a small room with a black Bible sitting on a table, she heard the words no parent should ever have to hear: “He didn’t make it.” 

A universe of pain lay before the grieving mother – confusion, wrath, rage, despair, emptiness. But another nightmare was about to begin.

There would be an investigation into Ben’s death, which the Connecticut medical examiner ruled a homicide in August 2014, and the part of her life that Lindsey worked so hard to keep hidden, was now poised to be exposed to the world.  

The 35-year-old, who privately suffered mental illness — including bipolar disorder and manic depression — would now face the possibility of her surviving kids being taken away. 

“There were two traumas – the first was losing Ben and the second was the immediate aftermath with DCF,” Lindsey said, referring to the case being mounted by the state Department of Children and Families, who demanded access to her medical files, which she feared would lead to her children being taken away.

“As soon as they found out I was bipolar, they came after me as well,” she said.

She fought to keep the records private — and it is only now that she is going public about her mental health.

Those early, dizzying days after Ben died became a haze of fear and survival. “We couldn’t grieve,” she said. Kyle couldn’t have unsupervised time with the girls.

While Lindsey herself was cleared early into the investigation of having involvement in what happened that day, the case against her soon intensified.

At the same time, her wrenching story became international news, and Lindsey outwardly projected strength, granting interviews and appearing on the Today Show, among other outlets. She garnered accolades for her courage, even being dubbed one of the most “fascinating” people of 2014 by a local outlet. But she felt anything but brave at the time, she said.

While she talked publicly about being strong and holding the family together, Lindsey was privately spiraling. “I didn’t feel courageous. I didn’t feel brave. I put on a coat of armor,” she said. “I thought if I showed one second of weakness, we would be completely devoured – by DCF, the police, media, strangers. So I felt like I couldn’t be weak.”

She writes about her mental illness being used against her. “I often felt as if the ingredients that made me human were gradually being stripped away, one by one. I had lost my son, my parental rights were in question, my husband’s physical freedom was an unknown, and the very core of my being, my mental illness, was now under intense examination,” she writes.

It naturally took its toll. “I kind of hit rock bottom,” she told The Post.

She wrote that she felt “stereotyped” and unequal in the eyes of the law. She was even advised that leaving Kyle would spare much agonizing red legal tape. “One [legal] view was that I was negligent just by staying with him,” she said.

After four months of investigations, Kyle, then 36, was charged with criminally negligent homicide in November 2014. He entered a plea that helped him avoid jail time, which the judge accepted. “I can’t punish you more than you have already been punished,” Superior Court Judge Kevin Ross said.

He joined Lindsey and daughters Kaylyn and Riley, who were her rock through unimaginable pain. Finally, they could heal as a family. Lindsey writes, “It was finally just about Ben.”

She had fled her beloved town of Ridgefield ahead of Kyle’s impending arrest, spiriting the girls away to Colorado Springs for a fresh start.

After Kyle was cleared, he joined his family, and they remained there for the next five years.

That first year was survival mode.

Still, Lindsey was self-medicating, first with benzodiazepines, then moved onto powerful mood stabilizers that acted as tranquilizers at night. Soon it was alcohol, and she was once drugged by a stranger while drinking at a ladies’ night late in 2015. Her goal was to drift off into oblivion every afternoon and evening. “I numbed myself,” she said. 

Forgiveness for Kyle would be anything but straightforward. It was “an instant that will continue to stand between us for a lifetime,” she writes.

“It’s been an eight-year journey,” she said. “I think the moment I found out Ben passed away, my heart forgave him. But it took a really long time for my mind to catch up.” 

There was plenty of self-flagellation for her as well. Lindsay thought about what she could have done differently. When she spotted his car on Main Street that morning, what if she had texted, “How was drop off?” instead of, “I see your car”?

“I’ll never stop replaying that day,” she said. “A lot of people focused on Kyle’s guilt, but I had guilt too. You always wonder, could I have done something different to save him and if so, would Ben be 10 years old right now?” As she writes, “I could never have imagined that on the one day I decided to take that moment, my son would die. That I would live with the guilt for eternity.” 

It‘s important for Lindsey, now 44 and a mental health advocate, to destigmatize mental illness — which she spent all of her adult years trying to hide. The book is the first time she has gone public on it.

“It’s my entire purpose in life now,” she said. “I was in hiding — until this book. I deserve to be who I am, just like everybody else.”

She of course thinks about — and talks to — her son every day, imagining milestones with soccer and school that could have been.

“When I see my friends’ sons on Facebook, what they’re doing, going to school, sports and stuff, it’s really hard. It’s the little things,” said Lindsey, who lives with Kyle and their daughters, now 17 and 14, in Morrisville, NC.

But Lindsey’s in a “good place” now, she’s “found peace — in almost every form at this point. There are still cracks and remnants that I’ll never be able to get rid of.” Still, “Being with the girls, going to sports events. The day-to-day gives me joy now. It’s a peace I probably haven’t had in a long time.”

Today the statistics for hot car deaths are staggering. Kids and Car Safety, a group Lindsey works within in advocating for car safety, has tracked 1,051 child hot car deaths nationwide since 1990. For Lindsey, “finding purpose in the pain” drove her to advocating for car safety measures — which resulted in the passage of the 2021 Hot Cars Act.

It requires car manufacturers to equip cars with a system to alert the operator to check rear-designated seating positions after the vehicle engine or motor is deactivated by the operator.

Nine years later, Lindsey reflected on her own redemption story. The “experience changed me,” she writes. “So much pain, yet so much love. I saw the best of humanity and the worst of humanity in such a short period of time.”