Boy, 3, Apparently Caused Car to Roll Before His Death

A 3-year-old Rancho Santa Margarita boy who died after being run over by his parents’ car somehow disengaged the parked vehicle’s manual transmission, allowing it to roll backward, authorities said Monday.

The child, who was standing on the passenger seat of his parent’s 1999 Honda Accord about 5 p.m. Sunday, fell or leaned on the gearshift, putting the car in neutral, Orange County sheriff’s spokesman Steve Doan said.

As the car rolled, the boy--identified by the coroner’s office as Chase Hankins--jumped out but was hit by the open car door and fell into the path of the front wheels. The car rolled down the steep driveway, which has an 8% grade, until it hit another car.

Investigators say details on how the car got moving were unavailable Monday and that exactly what happened may never be known.

Transportation experts say similar fatal accidents happen periodically throughout the country. They are rare enough that nobody has called for child safety locks on manual car transmissions. Still, experts say, the child’s death is a grim reminder of basic precautions parents should take to keep their kids safe in and around cars:

* Lock the car doors.

* If you have a manual transmission, leave parked cars in gear with the brake engaged.

* Educate children about the dangers of cars.

“It’s natural for children to want to experiment with driving a car like their parents, so you have to be especially careful once they reach that age where they’re past crawling and are getting more curious,” said Tim Hurd, spokesman for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in Washington, D.C. “It is very simple, though. Lock doors, supervise your kids.”

The boy’s parents, Wayne and Coral Hankins, could not be reached for comment Monday.

Paramedics used CPR to revive Chase, but he died of “vehicular blunt force trauma” about 30 minutes after the accident at Mission Hospital Regional Medical Center in Mission Viejo, according to coroner’s officials.

“We’re going to be investigating this for a while,” Doan said. “I imagine we will eventually interview the father. There are so many things that could have happened, but the only one who really knows is dead.”

Although investigators found the car in neutral, they have not ruled out other possibilities.

“It’s possible the boy fell and hit the parking brake,” Doan said. “It’s possible that he moved the car into gear without reaching the clutch. He could have fallen. You’d be surprised at how easy it is” to get a car moving by accident.

Other experts, however, said it should be difficult to do.

In most cars with manual transmissions, the clutch pedal functions as a built-in safety mechanism. In automatic transmissions, most car makers require that the brake pedal and a button on the shifter be depressed before the car can be put in gear.

Perhaps some older, worn-out cars have transmissions that can be shifted without depressing the clutch pedal, said Stephen Oesch, a senior vice president with the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety in Arlington, Va.

“Sometimes bad things happen, and this might be one of them,” he said. “If you put your car in gear, that should be enough of a child-safety lock. If you don’t depress the clutch pedal in a car, it should be very difficult to switch gears, though it is not impossible.”

Oesch said the institute, which conducts yearly crash tests and rates cars for safety, does not track incidents in which children are hurt or killed playing in or around cars.

Sheriff’s investigators said the boy was alone in the car.

“Obviously, the first question you ask is, ‘Where were the parents?’ and we don’t have an answer to that yet,” Doan said. “If we find there was some sort of child endangerment going on,” investigators will submit the case to the district attorney’s office.

“On the other hand, you have an 3-year-old who is just at that age where they get into everything, and sometimes . . . they just get away from you.”