The Lee County Sheriff's Office has released the 911 calls from the death of a 17-month-old left in a car in south Fort Myers, and says no arrests have been made

The Lee County Sheriff's Office has released the initial 911 calls made after a 17-month-old girl was found dead in a vehicle in south Fort Myers earlier this week. WINK News reported the release and the contents of the recordings.

According to that reporting, the child was found on Tuesday, July 21, at around 5 p.m., in the parking lot of a church near College Parkway and Summerlin Road. She was in the care of a foster family. WINK identified her by the first name Gracian. The sheriff's office made the recordings public on Friday afternoon.

In one call, WINK reported, a woman who identified herself as a friend of the foster mother described what she understood had happened, saying that her friend had taken the children to daycare, then gone to work, and that the baby had stayed in the car. In another, a woman is heard saying that she thought she had taken the child to daycare that morning. The recordings are the callers' own accounts given in the minutes after the discovery, and they are not a finding by any agency.

Two investigations are open, and they are separate. The Lee County Sheriff's Office has said its investigation is active, that no arrests have been made, and that it is working with the State Attorney's Office, according to WINK News. Separately, the Florida Department of Children and Families is conducting its own investigation, which WINK reported is ongoing; the department has not responded to the outlet's requests for further detail. Because the child was in a foster placement, the department's review reaches the supervision of that placement as well as the day itself.

No one has been charged. No person has been named by the sheriff's office as a suspect, and nothing in the released calls constitutes an accusation by an official body against anyone. Whether the case results in any charge is a decision that has not been made.

Coverage of the case by AccuWeather and WFTV placed it as at least the fifth child hot car death in Florida this year, citing Kids and Car Safety, a nonprofit that tracks these deaths nationally; the same organization listed it as the fourteenth in the United States in 2026.

There is no stable public address at which the sheriff's office has posted the released recordings or a standalone incident report, so this brief credits WINK News for the reporting and links its account rather than a document. Every factual claim about the incident here is attributed either to the Lee County Sheriff's Office or to the outlet reporting what the agency released. The accounts quoted from the 911 calls are the statements of the callers, reported by WINK News, and are not offered as established fact.