(WHTM) -- Kim Amato knows all too well that furniture can be dangerous to kids.
"My 3-year-old twin daughter, Meghan, was killed by her dresser the Saturday before Christmas in 2004," Amato said.
Amato says her daughter's death happened without warning while the rest of her family was sleeping.
"We assume she was climbing or standing in a drawer reaching for something and it was enough that her 28-pound little body caused her dresser to tip over onto her," she said. "Because it fell onto her on a carpeted floor, it wasn't loud enough to wake us up and she was unable to cry, so she actually suffocated within minutes."
Amato has now made it her mission to educate parents about the danger, founding the groups Parents Against Tip-Overs and Meghan's Hope.
Amato says the problem seems to spike this time of year.
Get daily news, weather, breaking news and alerts straight to your inbox! Sign up for the abc27 newsletters here!
"While you're watching the Super Bowl and watching the Olympics, your kids are acting it out and they're not thinking about safety," she said.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission agrees, adding that television sales ahead of the Super Bowl are a big part of the issue.
"People are buying televisions, getting them installed," said Chair Alexander Hoehn-Saric. "It's important to have them anchored to the wall."
The CPSC says every year furniture or tv tip-overs send 22,500 people to the emergency room. On average, 26 people are killed. Eighty percent of them are children.
"If you go to a hardware store you should be able to find an anchoring kit for less than $20 that's easy to install…20 minutes to do it," Hoehn-Saric said. "Often times furniture you're buying comes with anchoring kits."
Amato encourages people to find those anchoring kits for furniture in all rooms; even where kids are supervised.
"You're not faster than gravity and you can be in the same room and be powerless to stop it from happening."
For more information about anchoring your furniture, click here. To report or search for unsafe products, click here.
0 Commentaires