Proper restraint critical for kids

Angela Marie Cerpa was twice cited for violating California’s child passenger restraint law. Now, after a crash last month, she’s facing a murder charge.

Cerpa’s 3-year-old son Jeremy Ruiz was killed April 5 when her 1997 Honda Civic hit a tree in Carson. The 23-year-old Wilmington woman also was charged with child abuse for the injuries suffered by her other three children, ages 6 months, 18 months and 4 years. None of the children were in safety seats, according to authorities.

Although Cerpa’s case may be extreme, she is not alone in failing to properly secure her children in a car.

According to a recently released study, 1,794 children under the age of 16 were killed and 241,000 injured in vehicle accidents nationwide in 2003. Of those, more than half of the victims were unrestrained, and a third were sitting in the front seat.

“We are seeing children with fatal head injuries, serious facial injuries, spinal damage and severe organ injuries,” said Dr. Dennis R. Durbin, an attending physician in the emergency department at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Many of the fatalities and injuries, he said, are the result of unrestrained children being “ejected head first out of the vehicles.”

These deaths or injuries “could have been prevented if [the children] would have been properly secured in the rear seat in safety car seats or booster seats,” he said.

Durbin was one of the principal investigators and authors of the study, part of the Partners for Child Passenger Safety project, a collaboration between State Farm Insurance and the Philadelphia hospital.

The study said that it’s crucial for parents to keep youngsters restrained, no matter how short the trip.

“Crashes happen to the best of drivers and often on the most routine occasions, like grocery shopping or picking up kids from soccer practice,” said Dr. Flaura Koplin Winston, a pediatrician at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and another principal investigator on the study. “No one is immune from a crash.”

As children age they sometimes object to riding in a required safety seat, said Gerald Donaldson, senior research director of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, a Washington D.C.-based organization. Unfortunately, “some parents capitulate,” he said.

“I’ve seen some parents driving up to drop their children off at preschool and the children are unrestrained and standing up on the front seat,” said Donaldson. “If there’s a collision, they could be ejected right out of the vehicle.”

It can get even worse with teenagers and young adults. Children between the ages of 13 and 15 are most likely to not wear seat belts, according to 2003 data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Even when they begin driving, only 34% of 16- to 20-year-olds use seat belts, according to the NHTSA.

California, which has one of the highest rates of seat-belt use in the nation, requires that adults use seat belts and that children be properly restrained in vehicles. For children, that means being belted into a safety or booster seat in the back seat until they are at least 6 years old or weigh 60 pounds. State guidelines also note that seat belts do not fit most children properly until they are 8 to 11 years old.

Buying a family-friendly vehicle for transporting children is also important, according to the safety study. Doctors who participated were concerned about vehicles manufactured before 1998 that still have the first generation of air bags, which inflate more rapidly and can pose a danger to children in the front seat.

The study suggested that “larger, heavier vehicles, such as minivans, large and luxury passenger cars, and large SUVs tend to be the safest,” while compact pickup trucks and sport cars were considered the riskiest for transporting children.

But Durbin said the jury was still out on the safety of large sport utility vehicles.

“We know that some parents view SUVs as family vehicles; whether that is a good thing -- we are researching it,” he said. “The question is whether the weight advantage of an SUV is offset by the vehicle’s tendency to roll over.”

For information on proper restraints for children passengers, go to www.carseat.org.

Jeanne Wright can be reached at jeanrite@aol.com.