A Florida grandmother, 65, has been charged with aggravated manslaughter for the hot-car death of her 7-month-old granddaughter, less than a year after her toddler grandson drowned in a pond while she napped.
The baby girl died 11 months after her 16-month-old brother, Ezra, drowned in a pond while in the care of his grandmother.
Uriel Schock died in the back seat of an SUV, reportedly left unattended by grandmother Tracey Nix in Florida on 22 November.
The grandmother, a former school principal said she ‘just forgot’ about the infant after driving home from lunch and going to practice piano, leaving Uriel alone all afternoon in 32C heat with the windows up in the small town of Wauchula, according to the Hardee County Sheriff’s Office complaint affidavit.
The horrific story comes only three months after Uriel’s brother, Ezra, drowned in a pond aged 16-months-old while unattended at Nix’s home days before Christmas 2021.
Tracey Nix was looking after her granddaughter that Tuesday as her daughter, Kaila Nix, was getting her hair done.
After the death of Ezra, Kaila and partner Drew Schock ‘didn’t trust [Tracey] at all’ and would never let their four-year-old firstborn stay with her mother.
‘We were anxious, but I loved my mother and I am a daughter that wanted her mom in her life in some capacity, and in that moment, I thought that I could believe in second chances,’ Kaila said.
She said the ‘very minor amount of time’ that Nix saw Uriel was ‘almost always supervised.’
But Uriel was left unattended on 22 November, 2022, until one of Tracey’s grandsons arrived and ‘all of a sudden’ she realized she had left the infant in the car all day.
Her husband, Nun Ney Nix, performed CPR on the child unsuccessfully.
Nix attended a pretrial hearing on March 28, 2023.
Speaking to WFTS-Tampa, Kaila said: ‘If I’m objective, she needs to go to prison. As her daughter it kills me to say it. As their mother I demand it.’
‘They said they would want Ezra and Uriel to know “that we love them and that we are sorry’.
Ezra Nix drowned in a pond near Tracey’s home while unattended just days before Christmas 2021.
Three days before Christmas in 2021, Nix had reportedly dozed off on the couch. When she woke up and could not find her toddler grandson, she called her husband for help.
Ezra was later discovered lying unresponsive in a couple of feet of standing water outside his grandmother’s home.
Tracey then found young Ezra lying face down about knee-deep in the large pond within feet of their home.
She did not call 911 and started CPR, as reportedly learned during her time as an educator.
Tracey’s husband then called Drew, who told the child’s mother ‘something happened to Ezra.’
Kaila, who was then six-months pregnant, sped to her mother’s house, hitting 85mph on country roads and was involved in a head-on collision with another car.
Seeing the helicopter land overhead, she said she got out and ran without shoes to her mother’s house in ‘desperation to get my son’.
Tracey was not charged for the ‘one-time lapse of judgement’.
On Facebook, distraught mother Kaila told of her heartbreak as her son was taken off life support and died in her arms on 23 December 2021.
Uriel was born three months later in March 2022.
She said two hours after leaving her mother with Uriel to attend an appointment, Hardee County Sheriff’s Office told her that her mother had left her daughter ‘to die alone in her car’.
She wrote in November last year: ‘Completely broken. Traumatized. Enraged. Devastated. Overwhelmed.’
She now seeks justice for Uriel and Ezra.
A police report from May noted that the Tracey ‘did commit the offence of child neglect’, falling asleep while watching Ezra and citing redacted medications as possible causes.
Her husband told police they had issues with Ezra opening doors. Nun had pulled the door to the garage shut and placed a metal door stop behind the door, he said.
Tracey said that the doorstop was not in use.
Then in November 2022, local police arrived again to tell the mother her baby had died.
‘And I said, ‘I’m sorry, what? I know Ezra’s dead. Why are you here, like what – what is this?’” Kaila recalled.
And she was told: ‘No Kaila, your baby is dead.’
Kaila’s partner, Drew, said: ‘You couldn’t fathom it happening twice. Somebody has to answer for that.’
Tracey’s attorney told the i-Team at ABC Action News that Nix would not be making public statements.
He said Tracey was ‘totally devastated’ by the deaths.
