Posted in Catastrophic Injury,Child Injury,Wrongful Death on May 25, 2013
It is the leading cause of non-accident automobile-related fatalities for children below the age of 14 in the United States. Over the past decade alone, close to 500 children have been killed from heatstroke when they were left behind in a locked vehicle. With those kinds of fatality rates, you would expect that the automobile industry and related groups would have developed devices that could protect children from such risks. Unfortunately, that isn’t true at all. A number of the devices that are currently available in the market to alert parents to the risk of children being left behind in cars simply do not work as they are meant to.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has been trying to draw attention to the fact that far too many children are left behind in locked vehicles every year by parents who either forgot that their child was in the car, or believed that their child would be safe in the car for just a few minutes. None of these accidents occur on purpose, or involve parents who are completely aware of the kind of risks that their child is exposed to.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, this summer alone, as many as 15 children have been killed when they were left behind in locked vehicles.
Unfortunately, devices that are currently available in the market to alert parents when they’re about to exit the vehicle leaving a child behind, do not seem to function effectively. Researchers tested at least 18 of these devices, and found that many of them simply malfunctioned, or did not alert parents efficiently. Many of them simply did not meet the zero-error standard that the researchers were looking for. Learn more at: www.zanerhardenlaw.com.
