Power Window Switches Can Kill Children

June 16, 2004 -- Matthew Chappell was serving in the Middle East with the U.S. Air Force when he got the bad news. His 4-year-old daughter was killed in an accident involving a car.

But the May 24 accident in Box Elder, S.D., had nothing to do with a collision. Instead, Hailee Chappell was caught and killed in a power window.

"It happened so fast and it's so silent that you don't know," said Jessica Chappell, the girl's mother. She says she had left Hailee and her little sister, Madison, in the car for just a few minutes and when she returned she thought Hailee was just playing.

"The next thing I know I go outside and I see my daughter's hair blowing in the wind," Jessica Chappell said. "She had rolled her head up in the window."

Hailee's father remembers receiving the horrible news, thousands of miles away.

"They told me that my daughter was at the hospital, and wasn't with us anymore," Matthew Chappell said.

Theirs isn't the only sad story. In March, 3-year-old Rian Brandt was killed in Delphi, Ind., by a power window. In the last year, power windows have killed at least seven more children, including a 3-year-old Dallas girl on June 6 and a 4-year-old Wisconsin boy on June 2. The list goes on, and the details of each case are tragically similar.

Since 1990, power windows have killed at least 36 children, according to Kids and Cars, a nonprofit group that tracks auto-safety issues involving children. A 1997 government study by the National Center for Statistics and Analysis estimated power windows sent nearly 500 people to emergency rooms in one year, and that half the victims were small children.

Power windows are no longer a luxury option. They are equipped in 80 percent of all cars sold today. But certain power window designs have safety experts concerned they could pose a life-threatening hazard for children. Car makers say children should never be left alone in any vehicle, and certainly not one with the keys in the ignition.