James A. Lymburner Sr., outside his house in North Providence, says he deals with sickness and death as an emergency medical technician “but no one thinks it would hit home.”

The Providence Journal / Bob Thayer

As emergency medical technicians, James and Tammy Lymburner have long prided themselves in being always ready to save lives.

Both have worked for Universal Ambulance in Providence — James for 14 years and Tammy for 6. It is where they met and married.

James said, “We deal with sickness and death every day. But no one thinks it would hit home.”

But on Sunday afternoon, it did hit home.

The couple are divorcing, and Tammy Lymburner recently moved from the couple’s home on Woodcliffe Avenue in North Providence to 42 Suburban Parkway in the Oakland Beach area of Warwick.

On Sunday afternoon, she awoke from an afternoon nap alongside the couple’s 3-year-old son, James Jr., to discover that the boy had left the bedroom.

After a frantic search by neighbors and other family members, police officers were summoned shortly before 3:30 p.m. Ultimately, a 66-year-old man, a passerby who had joined the search, found the boy slumped unconscious on the back-seat floor of his mother’s Jaguar, parked only 30 feet from her front door.

Tammy Lymburner and the boy’s discoverer began administering CPR to the unconscious boy. Two police officers, Sgt. Stephanie Giblin and Patrolman David Delbonis, joined in the resuscitation efforts, but it was too late.

James was pronounced dead at Hasbro Children’s Hospital. James died of heart failure brought on by overheating, according to the police. Annemarie Beardsworth, spokeswoman for the state Medical Examiner's Office, said Wednesday that the cause of death is still pending and the findings should be released by the end of the week.

Warwick police Sgt Frederick R. Pierce said the hospital reported that James’ core body temperature was almost 108 degrees.

Tammy Lymburner was too distraught on Tuesday to speak to reporters.

She told the police earlier that it was routine for her son to nap around noon or 1 p.m., and after having worked two shifts, she lay down with him to take a nap. She had locks on the inside of the two doors to her home, sliding bolts at the tops of the doors, and had another latch that could have secured the bedroom.

But Sunday was a beautiful day, with temperatures topping out at 81 degrees at 2 p.m. A family member had offered to take Lymburner’s two young daughters swimming while another daughter left the house to go out with a friend.

That left Tammy and young James alone at home, and she decided not to engage the locks in case the others came home while they were asleep. Some did, at 2:45 p.m., and the search began.

James Lymburner said he and his wife began discussing a divorce three months ago and that she moved to the house in Warwick in April.

He said that when he first learned what happened, he became angry. But he said he quickly realized that “this is a tragedy that just happened. I don’t blame her or hold her responsible whatsoever.” Their nap together, he said, was “a normal routine they did all the time.”

Still, Lymburner said, he keeps going through the scenario in his mind, seeing his son getting into the car, which he said the child was fully capable of doing.

“He always wanted to go, go into the car, go to the park or the zoo or the carousel. He was extremely verbal for a 3-year-old. He used to run up to me and smile and say, ‘Up.’

“I just wonder why he didn’t get out of the car. He was probably playing and just fell asleep. That’s how victims of heat stroke succumb.”

The Lymburners — who between the two of them had five children, including Justin, 20, Jessica, 15, Julianna, 9, Jaime, 4, and James, who turned 3 in May — had met at work and married in 2005.

All the children were happy and healthy, the father said. James, he said, was always an especially active child, always smiling, and getting to the point where he was even learning to say words in Spanish, which he managed to pick up from watching the TV show Dora the Explorer.

On Sunday night, after James had died, the couple received requests from “organ donor places,” according to the father. After considering that it would help another family and it would be “something that James would have wanted,” Lymburner said he offered his consent only to be told it was too late because the medical examiner’s office was not prepared to release the body.

(Beardsworth, the medical examiner's spokeswoman, said Wednesday that the Medical Examiner's Office had conferred with the New England Organ Bank in a timely way, only to learn that most of James' organs couldn't be harvested for donation because of the time that already had passed; the organs that might have been harvested were the very ones needed for the office's investigation.)

“I’ve seen it multiple times, parents breaking down in the emergency room after their child or loved one has passed. At those times, you just go home and hold your children tight and tell them you love them. I don’t know why this happened. God had a different plan for him, and you try to come to an acceptance of that.”

Still, he said, “this is a nightmare no parent should ever go through.”

He said a funeral was scheduled for Friday in the J.J. Duffy Funeral Home, in Cumberland, with burial at Mount Calvary Cemetery, also in Cumberland.

WPRI (Channel 12) and Sovereign Bank have announced they will accept donations for a James Lymburner Jr. Fund.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that the autopsy was complete, and omitted the medical examiner's explanation of why James Lymburner's organs were not able to be donated..

Staff Writer Kate Bramson contributed to this report.

rdujardi@projo.com