Richardson, Texas – It was 2-year-old Adrianna’s day to go shopping, and her mom, Rachel, was looking forward to it.
It was Oct. 9, 2004, and David Clemens had made breakfast for everyone and cleaned up while his wife and daughter took a bath.
“I was blow-drying my hair,” Rachel recalls. “I flipped my hair over. I looked up, and she wasn’t there.”
Adrianna probably went upstairs, she thought.
Then she heard David’s screams.
He had told her he was going to move their SUV so he could get into a storage area above the garage ceiling to retrieve Halloween decorations.
“Adrianna must have come out of the kitchen and out to the garage,” she said. “And he backed out.”
Adrianna was hit by a 2 1/2-ton mass of steel.
She was one of more than 1,200 children younger than 15 killed since 2000 in nontraffic motor vehicle accidents in the United States. Half involved backovers, almost all of them involving children younger than 5, according to Kids and Cars, a child safety advocacy group in Leawood, Kan.
Each week, at least two children are killed and another 50 are hurt in backover accidents. Over three days in April, six children were killed; by the end of the month, 11 more died, the group said.
Rear cameras and audible warning sensors, technology that could reduce the number of fatalities, are not considered safety equipment by automakers and are offered only as optional parking aids in most vehicles. It could be years before they become as ubiquitous as seat belts.
“Everybody says the worst thing that could ever happen is the death of a child,” said Janette Fennell, the advocacy group’s founder and president. “What’s different in these, in over 70 percent of the cases, it’s a direct relative of the child that’s behind the wheel – mom or dad, grandma or grandpa, aunt or uncle.”
Losing a child, compounded by unimaginable guilt over who was responsible, leaves families traumatized and immobilized in grief.
Rachel and David believed they’d taken all the precautions to protect their children. They had a fence around the backyard pool, with a gate latch too high for the kids to reach. But when they purchased their Infiniti QX4, they were coaxed into getting a sunroof. No mention was made of rear cameras that could help them see better as they back up, Rachel said.
“My husband and I were comatose for months” after Adrianna died, Rachel said, and she still appears broken and frail, seated in an overstuffed chair in their suburban Dallas home.
On the beige walls of her “safety haven” are family snapshots and studio photos of Adrianna, one depicting her as an angel.
“I have to have her all around me,” Rachel said. “I feel her with me when I’m in here. I feel her closeness.”
A study by Consumer Reports magazine suggests SUVs, pickups and minivans are longer and taller and their blind zones extend as much as 50 feet from the rear bumper. These factors contribute to poor visibility, the report says.
