A Pet or Child Locked in a Hot Car in DeLand: What Florida Law Allows
A National Weather Service demonstration found a parked car went from a safe temperature to an unsafe 94.3 degrees in just over two minutes. Not an hour. Two minutes. That number is worth holding onto if you ever cross a parking lot off Woodland Boulevard and see a dog or small child alone behind glass. A pet locked in a car is a safety problem first, but Florida law decides what you are allowed to do about it, and it draws that line more narrowly than most people assume. Florida has a statute that shields someone who forces a window to get a trapped child or animal out, but only if they do several specific things in a specific order.
Key Takeaways
- A parked car can reach an unsafe interior temperature in about two minutes, according to National Weather Service testing.
- Leaving the windows slightly open does not meaningfully slow the heating rate, and neither does parking in the shade.
- Call 911 first. Florida Statute 768.139 makes notifying law enforcement a condition of the immunity, not an afterthought.
- That immunity covers civil liability for damage to the vehicle only. It is not blanket legal protection.
- All five statutory conditions must be met. Missing one means the protection does not attach.
- When nothing living is inside and the keys are simply locked in, it is an ordinary lockout, not an emergency.
Two Minutes Is the Number That Matters
A closed car parked in Florida sun becomes dangerous in minutes, not hours. National Weather Service safety guidance on children, pets and vehicles describes a test in which the interior went from a safe temperature to an unsafe 94.3 degrees in just over two minutes, and notes a dark dashboard or seat can easily reach 180 to over 200 degrees. The agency's summary is blunt: kids can die in 10 minutes. Children are not scaled-down adults here. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration states that a child's body temperature rises three to five times faster than an adult's, and reports that more than 1,000 children have died of heatstroke in vehicles over the past 25 years, 31 of them in 2025. In Volusia County the exposure window is long. The National Weather Service's Melbourne office lists Daytona Beach, the nearest climate station to DeLand, with normal daily highs of 85.0 degrees in May, climbing to 91.0 in July and still 87.9 in September. That is five consecutive months in which a car sitting in a DeLand lot is a hazard well before lunchtime.
Cracking the Windows Does Not Buy Time
Leaving a window open an inch does not solve the problem. The National Weather Service states that leaving the windows slightly open does not significantly decrease the heating rate, and NHTSA makes the same point from the other direction: rolling windows down or parking in the shade does little to change the interior temperature of the vehicle. The reason is that the heat is not really trapped air, it is trapped surfaces. Sunlight passes through the glass and is absorbed by the dashboard, the seats and the carpet, which radiate it back into a cabin with almost no airflow. A two-inch gap at the top of a door glass moves nowhere near enough air to offset a dash at 180 degrees. This changes how you read a car from outside it. A cracked window is not evidence of a precaution that worked, and neither is a shaded space: shade moves, and a car parked in shade at eleven is in full sun by one.
Call 911 Before You Touch the Glass
The first call is 911, every time, before any attempt to open the vehicle. NHTSA's guidance to anyone who sees a child alone in a car is to act immediately and call 911. That call does two jobs: it starts trained responders moving, and under Florida law it is a condition you must satisfy before any legal protection applies to you. Law enforcement also carries authority you do not. Florida Statute 316.6135 makes it an offense to leave a child younger than six alone in a vehicle for more than 15 minutes, and at any point regardless of time if the engine is running, the child's health is in danger, or the child appears to be in distress. The same statute authorizes an officer who observes a child left that way to use whatever means are reasonably necessary to protect the child and remove them from the vehicle. It grants that to officers, not to the public. In DeLand that call reaches responders working out of a city whose county government offices sit at 123 W. Indiana Ave., just off the downtown core.
What Florida Statute 768.139 Actually Protects
Florida Statute 768.139 gives immunity from civil liability for damage to the vehicle, and nothing beyond that. Its title, Rescue of vulnerable person or domestic animal from a motor vehicle; immunity from civil liability, is the whole point. It is a shield against the owner suing you over a broken window. It is not a general permission slip and it is not criminal immunity. The statute defines its terms narrowly: a domestic animal is a dog, cat or other animal domesticated and kept as a household pet, with livestock and farm animals excluded; vulnerable person takes its meaning from section 435.02, motor vehicle from section 320.01. The immunity attaches only if all five of these are true. You determined the vehicle was locked, or that there was otherwise no reasonable way for the person or animal to get out unaided. You had a good-faith, reasonable belief, based on the circumstances known to you, that entry was necessary because the person or animal was in imminent danger of suffering harm. You made sure law enforcement was notified or 911 was called before entering, or immediately afterward. You used no more force than was necessary to enter and remove them. And you remained with the person or animal in a safe location nearby until law enforcement or another first responder arrived.
The Conditions Are a Chain, Not a Menu
Miss one condition and the protection does not attach. The five run together rather than as options, so a rescue satisfying four of them has no statutory shield behind it. Two are the ones people lose. The first is staying put: pulling a dog out, handing it to a bystander and leaving before an officer arrives fails the last condition outright, however reasonable it felt at the time. The second is force. Using no more force than necessary points at one window, the one farthest from the occupant, not the nearest or easiest. The good-faith belief standard is doing real work too, measured against the circumstances known to you at that moment, which is why a dispatch record of what you reported, and when, matters beyond the statute's checkbox. A dog lying quietly in a running car with the air conditioning on is a different set of known circumstances from a dog panting hard in a sealed car at noon in July. Subsection (3) also says the section neither limits nor expands any immunity under section 768.13 for the care or treatment given afterward. Getting them out and what you do next are governed separately.
When Nobody Is in Danger, It Is Just a Lockout
If nothing living is inside and the keys are simply on the seat, none of the above applies, because that is an ordinary lockout. The distinction is worth drawing hard, since the two get discussed as one problem and are not. A locked car with nobody in it has no clock running on it, and no reason for anyone to break glass over it. That is what a service call is for. A professional lockout opens the door without a broken window, without torn weatherstripping or trim, and without disturbing a side-impact airbag or the wiring packed into a modern door. Tempered side glass, the cleanup, and whatever fell into the door cavity usually cost more. DeLand offers this scenario plenty of places to happen: the lots around Stetson University's campus at 421 N. Woodland Blvd., the downtown blocks off Indiana Avenue, and the retail strips along East New York Avenue, which carries State Road 44 through town.
This article is general information about Florida law, not legal advice. If a child or an animal is in danger, call 911 first. Emergency responders come before any service call.
Locked out of an empty car in DeLand?
If nobody is inside and the keys are, that is a routine lockout. Our roadside team can open it without breaking anything.
What Decides It in the Thirty Seconds You Have
The deciding question is not whether you are permitted to break the window. It is whether the occupant is in imminent danger right now, because that is the only thing the statute's protection turns on. Call 911 first and stay on the line: dispatch can often reach the owner faster than you can, and officers carry tools that do less damage. If the danger is clearly there and help has not arrived, 768.139 stands behind you, provided you called, used the minimum force, and stayed until a responder came. If nobody is inside and it is only keys on a seat, none of this applies and breaking glass just creates a second problem. For that ordinary version, DeLand Towing Service handles vehicle lockouts as part of its roadside assistance across DeLand and the surrounding Volusia County towns.
Keys on the Seat and the Doors Locked?
DeLand Towing Service handles vehicle lockouts, jump starts and roadside calls across DeLand and Volusia County, with no broken glass involved.
(386) 845-3790 Call (386) 845-3790