So I’m driving back to my town to do one last job, but at one point I see way up ahead that the police have stopped traffic, and everybody is taking a detour along a back road. It takes me about 30 minutes to get to my job. During that time my brother called me for something, and I told him to avoid that area if he could. I wondered what in the world had happened.
Basically, a woman was driving with her 3 children, when her 3 year old opened the back door, fell out, and was pretty much immediately hit and decapitated by another car. Pretty much everyone directly involved is a basket case right now.
That literally almost made me sick reading it. I can’t imagine what the family must be going though. I can’t imagine what the driver who hit her is going through.
That’s so unimaginably awful, I can’t even begin to wrap my head around it. The poor mother, the poor other driver, those poor siblings, it’s just so terrible I’m at a loss for words.
Well, to be fair, if I was really able to speak to Michele’s family, I would probably not be so tactless as to say “If you had taken the time to move the carseat into your loaner vehicle, she wouldn’t have died so horribly.”
I don’t think I’d go quite so far as to try to reassure them that there was nothing they could have done to avoid this, though.
That poor woman, the poor driver, the poor siblings…what a tragedy.
Just to think - even if it was just one time she forgot to transfer the car seat, an innocent life ended. There’s no way of knowing when this will happen. The mother must be overridden with grief and guilt. When that sort of thing happens, you want to place the blame on someone, even if that someone is yourself.
I’m guessing that that thought runs through the mother’s head approximately once every 3 seconds.
But really, how much of a difference would it have made? Aren’t carseats’ primary job to make children survive more crashes? Is it that much harder to climb out of a carseat than it is to pop a seatbelt? IME, getting out of either requires pressing a red button. I really think that the carseat angle is being given way too much focus.
It takes a lot longer for them to scramble out than a regular seatbelt does.
Seatbelt: Press the button once, the latch pops out as the belt retracts (or is popped out helpfully by the buckle itself) and slide from the seat.
Carseat: Press the button, tug the two latches out (something that even I have difficulty doing at times if the button isn’t pressed correctly. Only one might pop out, not both), unhook/latch the chest connector, slip both arms from the harness, scramble out.
Definitely harder, for a deft child by themselves it can take at least a minute or two, especially if the harness is adjusted correctly.
I feel so bad for the family and especially the other driver. I can’t even imagine going through something like that.
IME, kids don’t unbuckle their carseats when they’re scrambling out. It just takes a little wiggling, and they’re out. My niece HATED riding in a carseat. It was a battle every time to keep her in one. She’d be back out again as soon as you turned your back.
I couldn’t read those news accounts because it would just freak me out too much. For anyone who has a seatbelt/carseat escape artist, most (newer?) cars have childproof locks on the doors that allow the car to be opened from the outside, but not the inside. We have a '96 (and had a '93 when we lived in Australia) and both cars had these locks. You usually have to flip a latch on the door (the part that’s not exposed when it’s closed) in order to activate it.
Newer cars come with child-safety locks on the back doors that prevent them from being opened from the inside. If your car has this feature and you have very young children, please make sure that it’s engaged.
