Chicago acts on the Tribune's investigation of deaths involving crib bumpers - Chicago Tribune

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September 09, 2011|By Ellen Gabler

The Chicago City Council voted this week to ban the sale of crib bumpers in the city. The new ordinance is in response to Tribune investigations that began about a year ago.

That?s when we heard about the death of 7-week-old Preston Maxwell. In the spring of 2010, Preston?s father found the baby with his face pressed between his crib mattress and bumper pad. He was dead.

And that?s when I started digging. As it turned out, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission had received reports of 52 children dying where a bumper pad was mentioned in the report of the death. But officials within the safety agency said that there was no evidence that showed bumper pads had caused suffocations. Many times, other factors were present in deaths such as pillows or blankets being in the crib.

I requested all the cases of kids who died where bumper pads were mentioned in the report of the death. It was a lot of paper. In some cases, bumper pads weren?t relevant in the deaths. But in many, they were. Medical examiners and coroners had decided the children had suffocated after they were found with their faces against a bumper pad.

As I sorted through the files, it also became clear that the safety agency hadn?t investigated at least 17 deaths. All the agency had was a death certificate or an autopsy report that suggested the child suffocated. By contacting police departments, medical examiners and families of the children, I discovered that some of those kids likely suffocated against bumper pads too.

You can read the investigations that lead up to Thursday's City Council action by checking out the first article and the second. Just click on the links.

--�Ellen Gabler

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Source: http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNGvvrgVa7VpAAuvfehUpcxhxqQ7tg&url=http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/tribnation/chi-the-chicago-tribunes-crib-bumper-investigation-20110909,0,3084333.story

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