Strollerderby : car accident

Dad Dies 15 Hours After Daughter's Birth

Amy Kuras — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 17:29:00 GMT

This is one of those stories that made me want to grab my family and hug them hard. Drew Pearson, who was 27 years old and had just welcomed his baby daughter the day before, was killed in a car accident while running errands the morning after his daughter was born.

Most of us remember that first night in the hospital with your new baby. You are shellshocked with the new responsibility you have just taken on, not entirely sure what to do with this little person, and unable to stop staring at this beautiful little being you have created. One thing you’re likely not doing, is sleeping.

A sleep-deprived Pearson’s car slammed into the back of a slow-moving semi. His wife discovered something was wrong when she called his cell phone with an update from the morning pediatrician visit and finally got an answer from a staffer at another hospital. Finally the hospital social worker where she was came in to tell her her husband was dead. They had been married two years.

Before he left the hospital that morning, the new family got a few pictures of Pearson with his daughter. One of them is now blown up over the little girl’s crib, and his wife, Emily, says her daughter seems very drawn to them.

Family and friends held a fundraiser for Pearson’s wife and daughter. He was an instructor in the PGA golf management program at Florida Gulf Coast University and managed a nearby golf course. That’s why I am writing about this – not to bum everybody out, but to let people know. I know there are plenty of more tragic things in this world, but I think everyone who is a parent would feel their hearts torn out by this story.

Think Your Baby's Car Seat Is Safe? Think Again

Kate Tuttle — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 14:59:00 GMT

In a withering expose published this week, the Chicago Tribune unearthed safety tests whose results raise questions about the dangers posed by several popular car seat models. The findings, which resulted from tests conducted by the National HIghway Traffic Safety Administration to determine the comparative safety ratings of cars, not the car seats inside them, were never released to the public, however, and in some cases were unknown even to the companies that make the car seats. Yet as the Tribune points out, such information would be of great interest to parents, who have to make choices about which car seat to buy based on nothing but the marketing mantras produced and promoted by the companies that make them.

Among the car seats performing poorly in the NHTSA tests -- videos of which can seen on the Tribune web site -- are the Graco SafeSeat, the Britax Companion, and the EvenFlo Discovery (which was recalled after the tests were completed). In nearly half of the seats tested, the bucket flew out of its base before or the seat's dummy occupant incurred damage which "exceded injury limits." In the videos of the tests, the seats can be seen flipping over backward to slam their infant dummies, face first, into the back of the car's front seat.

According to the Tribune article, this kind of result, seen repeatedly in the NHTSA tests conducted on actual cars, are seldom seen in the testing required of car seats, because those tests all feature a "sled bench," a mechanical stand-in for a car that lacks the physical features of a car's interior, such as front seats. All car seats sold in the US must pass muster in a 35 mph crash in the sled bench. The NHTSA tests unearthed by the Tribune simuulated a 30 mph head-on collision in a car.

Researchers and public safety advocates agree that car seats save lives, but also that manufactuters and government need to do a better job of testing their safety, and of informing the public about the results of those tests. It looks, at least for now, as if the latter part will take place. From the Tribune article:

"What you've uncovered totally reveals the flaws in the current safety standard and also NHTSA's negligence in not reporting this to the public," said Joan Claybrook, a former NHTSA administrator and president emeritus of the advocacy group Public Citizen.

Responding to the Tribune investigation, newly installed Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said in a written statement Friday that he ordered a "complete top to bottom review of child safety seat regulations" and directed staff to make the crash-test results "more available" to consumers.

Although some manufacturers responded with plans to implement car crash testing to replace or augment the traditional sled tests, others continue to question the NTSB methodology. A spokesman for Graco agued that the testers must not have properly installed the carseat -- a frequent enough complaint, apparently, that the NTSB included owner's manual diagrams in its material to prove that even when properly installed, the SafeSeat flew off its base in some of their testing.

For parents who take their children's safety incredibly seriously -- which is to say, for all parents -- such information should not be blocked or evaded by manufacturers eager to defend the status quo, and their bottom line. Uniform, realistic, and stringent testing should be required, and the results published and distributed as widely as possible. The government should demand more from the manufacturers, and so should parents.

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Accident Prone: How Can We Protect Kids From Accidental Death?

Kate Tuttle — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 20:01:00 GMT

A new study looking at global trends in child mortaility pinpointed accidents as the killers of 830,000 children worldwide each year. And in a way, that's the good news: accidents, it turns out, are at least potentially preventable, and on a small scale, unlike the bigger child-killers such as pneumonia and diarrhea.

The report, authored by UNICEF and the World Health Organization, looked at trends across different countries and regions, and compared by age and gender. What it finds is that while 95% of accidents befall children in countries that aren't poor, 40% of accidental deaths occur in the poorest countries -- the implications in terms of first-aid and healthcare systems are inescapble.

Even more compelling, perhaps, are the lessons to be gained in terms of prevention. While the leading causes of infant death are disease-related, as children grow older two types of accidents -- car crashes and drowning -- rise to near the top of the list. Changes in speed limits, car seats and seatbelts, and even road signage could have a drastic and immediate effect on these numbers. As for drowning, simply mandating that children learn to swim was enough to save thousands in Sweden, where swimming lessons were among a host of public policy iniatives that has cut that country's accidental death rate in children by more than 80% in forty years. Such a tiny improvement as child-proof caps on kerosene bottles would save an estimated 5,000 children a year.

With all the worry that American parents tend to put into dangers that are statistically irrelevant -- stranger abduction, for instance, or Internet prostitution rings -- maybe we'd all be better off pushing for the small but significant changes that can really save lives. While your own community may offer swimming pools and lessons, it's likely your cross-town poor neighbors don't have the same kind of access. Supporting politicans who pledge to even the playing field for all our kids is a good start (and those UNICEF boxes at Halloween, hokey as they may appear, start to seem downright heroic).

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Hero Grandfather Saves Baby, Now In Critical Condition

Kate Tuttle — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 22:33:00 GMT

A retired Colorado firefighter made an instinctive move of self-sacrifice to save his newborn granddaughter last week; now he's battling back from a horrible array of injuries. Jim Lewin, a 29-year veteran of the Los Angeles County fire department, was walking with his family in Littleton, CO, last Friday night when an out-of-control truck came speeding toward them. As the truck approached, Lewin shoved the stroller holding his 12-day-old grandchild out of the way, seconds before being struck and dragged 75 feet by the truck.

Lewin's injuries include fractures to several ribs, wrist, nose, and other facial bones; a bruised lung; and a severed artery in his neck, which has caused several strokes. He's currently sedated and breathing with a ventilator, but the family reports that he has responded when he hears familiar voices.

I think we all wonder what kind of superhuman strength or courage we could muster when needed, and most of us hope we'd be able to do whatever was necessary to protect our children. Thankfully few of us will be faced with such a test, but Lewin was, and I can only hope he'll recover to enjoy more years with his family.

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And You Thought Asshole Rehabilitation Was Impossible

Amy S.F. Lutz — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 19:01:00 GMT

As you scroll through the Strollerderby posts, you may have occasionally wondered, "How could these snarky little snippets, scrolling down my screen, too many to actually read, have any impact at all in the world?

Well, I'll tell you: just days after I personally awarded Tomas Delgado the Asshole of the Century Award for suing the parents of Iriondo Trinidad, the boy he flattened while screaming down a Spanish highway at 100 mph, Delgado decided to drop his lawsuit against the boy's parents for damages done to his car in the accident.

Coincidence? I hardly think so.

It was certainly this award that mobilized hundreds of Spaniards to mob a courthouse where the lawsuit was being heard, and to cheer at the news that Delgado would not be proceeding - although by all accounts he still believes that he "was a victim too." But the public outcry, which he claimed amounted to a "lynching," was just too much for him to bear.

Do you know any assholes who need rehabilitation? Send nominations my way, and we at Strollerderby will make them change their nefarious ways.