Family Sues Stork Craft Over Deadly Crib

December 1, 2009

New Iberia, Louisiana - The family of a 7-month-old baby who died after being entrapped between a crib’s drop-side rail and mattress has filed on Monday a product-related lawsuit against Stork Craft Manufacturing Inc. which recently announced a recall that covers more than 2 million defective cribs in US and Canada.

In a court-affidavit, David Morgan and Kira Vaughan said their son suffered from “conscious pain and suffering” and accused the company of failing to provide safe products to consumers.

In the early morning of May, Vaughan went to her son’s crib and found him unresponsive. According to medical report, the baby died from “mechanical asphyxia” caused by prolong suffocation.

Meanwhile, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) linked the defective cribs to four deaths of children who died from accidental suffocation as they were trapped in a small space between the crib’s drop-side rail and mattress.

The agency also received 67 cases of drop-side detachments and 15 incidents of entrapment caused by the cribs. These numbers do not reflect the cases of injuries which happened in Canada.

For the past two years, more than 5 million cribs, most of which have drop-side rail, have been recalled over defective designs.

Drop-side cribs have a rail which can be moved down to allow parents, especially short adults, to put their babies on the crib more easily. However, CPSC and several consumer groups are proposing to ban this design and urge parents to use cribs which have four fixed sides.