Pennsylvania Child Car Seat Injury Attorneys
Car accidents can cause a devastating emotional and financial toll on all parties involved. But this devastation is multiplied if a child is involved or injured, especially if you took all of the proper safety precautions. Parents use child car seats because they believe they will keep their most precious cargo safe from harm. As a new parent, you read all of the recommendations about child safety, but something still went terribly wrong, and now your child is seriously injured with a spinal cord injury, or worse yet death. When you purchase a car safety seat, you have the right to believe that the product is safe, and will protect and keep you child safe. Car seats have an overwhelming impact on the safety of children in car accidents. Hundreds of children’s lives are saved annually due to the protection of car safety seats. Poor design, faulty locking and latch systems, manufacturing defects, and lack of warnings or instructions to caution consumers about known hazards, however, can lead to catastrophic injury including paraplegia, quadriplegia, blindness, amputations, and wrongful death.
Car accidents are the leading cause of death and acquired disabilities in children. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) recently released the newest safety standards and regulations for children. Even with evolving safety recommendations, standards, and laws in place nationwide, children have been subject to serious injury and death in car accidents.
Baby and child car safety seats are designed to protect children and shield them from the violent forces of a car accident. Defects and product failures, however, can render child safety seats useless or even harmful to children and cause strangulation, spinal cord injuries, skull fractures, paralysis, traumatic brain injury, and death. Some common car seat dangers include breaking locks and latches, buckles and latches that come undone in high impact situations, misplaced safety restraints that do not properly secure a child, insufficient padding to absorb excessive force, flammable fabrics, and poor design that does not offer enough head and neck support for infants. Weak shell design, brittle materials, or improper construction of a child safety seat can cause the seat to crumple or cave in, causing the type of catastrophic injuries to a child that the car seat was intended to protect against.
Adding to the potential for danger in car safety seats, NHTSA reported that most car seats are not installed properly, and 7 out of every 10 children are not properly restrained in vehicles. One study showed that 95% of inexperienced customers failed at properly installing a car safety seat. NHTSA stated that confusing and unclear instructions contributed to the failure of proper installation. They offered several suggestions to car seat manufacturers to avoid potential installation error such as labeling components more clearly, redesigning seats to avoid confusion and require fewer steps, and making sure that car seat instruction manuals and car owner manuals did not conflict.
Consumers have every right to believe products they purchase to keep their children safe will work properly, and be free from defects and flaws. If you are faced with a seriously injured child due to a defective car safety seat, you may be left with huge medical bills that could span the rest of your child’s life. You may be entitled to compensation for medical costs, rehabilitation costs, pain and suffering, and lost wages for days you had to take off work to care for your injured child. The experienced Pennsylvania product liability lawyers and Philadelphia defective car seat attorneys at Reiff & Bily will investigate and find out who is responsible for any physical, emotional, or financial hardships a defective product may leave you with. With a proven track record of going up against the world’s top manufacturers and corporations, you can be sure we will fight hard for what is right. When it comes to defective products and defective child and infant seats, we are greedy for justice.
