Boston Personal Injury Lawyer

Maclaren Stroller Recall: What A Parent Should Do

Steven Schafer — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:01:00 GMT

On November 9, 2009, Maclaren USA, the American subsidiary of the British manufacturer of umbrella strollers and other children’s products, “voluntarily” recalled about 1 million strollers because of fingertip lacerations and amputations. According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, “The stroller’s hinge mechanism poses a fingertip amputation and laceration hazard to the child when the consumer is unfolding [or] opening the stroller.”

Two earlier articles focused on the supposed “voluntary” aspect of the recall and a manufacturer’s responsibility to identify and eliminate design defects so that injuries like these don’t happen. This article speaks to what a parent who owns a recalled stroller should do.

Parents and caretakers should be skeptical about the “voluntary” nature of this recall and the accuracy of the numbers cited – Maclaren says it received 15 reports of children placing their finger in the stroller’s hinge mechanism, resulting in 12 reports of fingertip amputations in the United States.

Parents and caretakers should also be skeptical of Maclaren’s free repair kit, which appears to consist of cloth hinge covers that snap onto the frame. Covers that easily snap in place can also be easily removed, yet the unsafe pinch points remain. From a design standpoint, a guard or cover that can be easily removed without disabling the product is inadequate. One must be concerned that the next family who inherits the stroller may be unaware of the covers’ importance and may remove them for any number of reasons. Covers may be removed once they get dirty and may not be replaced. (Doesn’t Maclaren realize that peanut butter and jelly and many other substances are inherent to this product’s expected environment of use?)

If you have a recalled Maclaren stroller:

And, after careful consideration, you want to continue to use the stroller, then you should request the hinge covers from Maclaren and only use the stroller when the hinge covers are in place;
And you are not wedded to the stroller, then you do not have to settle for the hinge covers. You should write to Maclaren – emails are good; snail mail sent certified, return receipt requested, is better; both methods are best – and request a refund. If they insist on your returning the stroller first, go ahead and do that, but request that they pay the shipping costs. Maclaren can be contacted at www.maclaren.us/recall.

If you have a recalled Maclaren stroller, and you have seen your child place a finger in the hinge mechanism:

You should report this to Maclaren and either request the hinge covers or a refund (see above);
You should also report this to the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The CPSC Recall Hotline is 800-838-2772. The CPSC website is https://www.cpsc.gov/cgibin/incident.aspx.

If you have a recalled Maclaren stroller, and your child has suffered a lacerated or amputated finger or other injury from the hinge mechanism:

Do not use the stroller, with or without hinge covers;
Do not throw the stroller away, but store it in a safe, clean place;
You or an attorney should write to Maclaren and report the injury (see above);
You or an attorney should report the injury to the Consumer Product Safety Commission (see above);
You are entitled to reimbursement for your child’s medical bills (past and future) and your son or daughter is entitled to compensation for pain and suffering and disfigurement, including corrective surgery if available and indicated.

No consumer who has been injured by an unsafe product need apologize for exercising his or her legal rights. Despite the protestations of manufacturers and the insurance industry, product liability claims in the United States have led to safer roads, workplaces, schools, and homes. To illustrate, double hand controls on industrial machines prevent an operator’s hands from getting in the way of moving parts. Automobiles are now more crashworthy because of stronger structural components, padded dashboards, airbags, safety glass, seatbelts and crush zones. And children’s toys don't have small parts that can be swallowed or lead paint that can be ingested. Product liability claims pressed by consumers and their attorneys have led to these improvements.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Steven Schafer

Maclaren Stroller Recall: Free Repair Kit Costs More Than Its Worth

Steven Schafer — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:01:00 GMT

Maclaren says it received 15 reports of children placing their finger in the stroller’s hinge mechanism, resulting in 12 reports of fingertip amputations in the United States.

My last article focused on the purported “voluntary” aspect of the recall and questioned how Maclaren was gathering and maintaining reports of accidents and near-accidents. This article will focus on the manufacturer’s responsibility to identify and eliminate design defects so that injuries like these don’t happen. My next article will speak to what a parent who owns a recalled stroller should do.

Manufacturer’s Legal Duty. Under the law, a manufacturer is responsible for acting reasonably - or exercising "due care" - in designing, manufacturing and testing a product to make sure that the product is fit for a particular purpose. If there is an unsafe aspect to the product that results in injuries to the person using it, or someone close by, the manufacturer can be held responsible for the injuries on the basis of negligence, or for having breached express and implied warranties about a product’s fitness. A manufacturer must anticipate the environment in which its product will be used, taking into account the sophistication and knowledge of the operator or consumer, the location where a product will be used, and the foreseeable uses and even misuses to which the product may be placed. The manufacturer must design against reasonably foreseeable risks of injury in this context.

So, in the case of a children’s stroller, a manufacturer must anticipate that a child may place his or her hand or fingers on the stroller’s frame when a parent or caregiver is opening or closing the stroller. Just think of the mother with two or three children in tow, who is setting up or collapsing a stroller next to the family car in the parking lot at the mall. She has children to watch, bundles to handle, and traffic to look out for, all while she is opening and closing the stroller. There should be no possibility that the stroller’s hinge mechanism will allow a toddler’s finger to get in the way. Mom, dad, grandma or the babysitter cannot be held to the level of expertise of the design engineer and should not have to inspect the stroller to make sure that there are no areas where the child’s hands or fingers can be caught or pinched. We protect industrial workers by eliminating or covering exposed gears and moving parts on machinery; a stroller should be designed with no less concern for safety.

Manufacturer’s Design Responsibilities. Hazard and risk analysis has become a staple of mechanical engineering. When studying safety engineering, students learn the so-called "safety hierarchy" of design, which is intended to identify, and then eliminate or reduce the risk of injury from a hazard posed by a product.

The design engineer must identify hazards (such as a pinch point, where parts of a product can catch a part of the body and cause injury) and evaluate the chances of an injury occurring, and the severity of the injury.

Once a risk of injury has been identified, the design engineer should try to eliminate the risk entirely, by reconfiguring that part of the product. When it comes to a hinge mechanism into which little fingers can fit, perhaps the space is made larger so that fingers cannot be pinched when the hinge is opened and closed. Or, perhaps the space is made smaller so that a finger cannot possibly fit into the space.

If the risk of injury cannot be eliminated by a change in design, then the engineer should try to guard against the risk. A permanent, non-removable hinge cover might work in this instance.

If the risk of injury cannot be eliminated by a design change, or guarded against by a cover, then the designer may resort to warnings or instructions. There is a science to proper warnings and instructions. They must first alert the user with attention getting words that are commensurate to the hazard (such as DANGER in yellow against a black background, or WARNING in red and white, or CAUTION in orange and black). A proper warning should then alert the user to the hazard (such as "In-Running Rollers" or "Sharp Blade"). A proper warning should tell the user what to do or what not to do (like "Keep Hands Away from Opening") to avoid the hazard. And finally, a proper warning should tell the user the consequences if he or she disregards the warning (for example, "Placing Hands in Vicinity of In-Running Rollers May Result in Amputation or Other Serious Injury").

Legalistic warnings and instructions may give the manufacturer an argument in court, but do little to communicate to the consumer the information he or she needs to use a product safely. Warnings like “Be Careful” do not communicate necessary information.

While a manufacturer might argue that warnings and instructions are unnecessary and that the hazard is obvious or a matter of common sense, a proper warning (when the hazard cannot be eliminated by a design change or when a guard or cover will not work) might say:

WARNING

AMPUTATION POINT! OPENING IN HINGE MECHANISM MAY ACCOMMODATE A CHILD’S FINGERS

KEEP YOUR CHILD’S HANDS AND FINGERS OFF FRAME AND AWAY FROM HINGE MECHANISM WHEN OPENING AND CLOSING STROLLER

YOUR CHILD’S FINGERS MAY BE AMPUTATED OR SEVERELY CUT IF THEY ARE IN THE HINGE MECHANISM WHEN STROLLER IS OPENED OR CLOSED

Even the best warnings and instructions, however, don’t take the place of good design that eliminates the hazard and risk of injury altogether, and they don't substitute for a guard when the good design cannot eliminate the hazard and risk of injury.

Maclaren has chosen to guard against the risk of injury by offering a "free repair kit," consisting of hinge covers for the pinch points where a child's finger can be cut or amputated. The hinge covers appear to be made of cloth and snap onto the frame. A cover that easily snaps in place can also be easily removed, yet the unsafe pinch point remains. From a design standpoint, a guard or cover that can be easily removed without disabling the product, is inadequate. One must be concerned for the next family that inherits the stroller and who may be unaware of the covers’ importance, or that the covers will be removed once they get dirty. (Doesn’t Maclaren realize that peanut butter and jelly and many other substances are inherent to this product’s expected environment of use?)

The "free repair kit" might be worth just what Maclaren is charging for it, and a lot less than the $2 per stroller that Maclaren is reportedly spending on the kit.

What should a parent do?

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Steven Schafer

Maclaren's "Voluntary" Recall of Strollers May Not Be So Voluntary

Steven Schafer — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 14:26:50 GMT

On November 9, 2009, Maclaren USA, the American subsidiary of the British manufacturer of umbrella strollers and other children’s products, “voluntarily” recalled about 1 million strollers because of reports of children suffering fingertip lacerations and amputations. According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, “The stroller’s hinge mechanism poses a fingertip amputation and laceration hazard to the child when the consumer is unfolding [or] opening the stroller.”

This article will focus on the “voluntary” aspect of the recall. Future articles will focus on the manufacturer’s responsibility to identify and eliminate design defects so that injuries like these don’t happen, and what a parent who owns a recalled stroller should do.

Maclaren says it received 15 reports of children placing their finger in the stroller’s hinge mechanism, resulting in 12 reports of fingertip amputations in the United States.

This recall is about as voluntary as Bernard Madoff’s plea bargain, and Maclaren’s press release about as sincere as Madoff’s confession. The Consumer Product Safety Act requires a manufacturer to report consumer complaints to the CPSC where the manufacturer has notice that one of its products contains a defect that amounts to a substantial product hazard or poses an unreasonable risk of serious injury or death.

The CPSC can order a manufacturer to notify its customers and the public and to recall the product, and it can impose hefty fines if a manufacturer has withheld information, not acted quickly enough in reporting its knowledge to the CPSC, or otherwise placed the public at risk. Faced with an imminent government order, a manufacturer often decides that it’s better to cooperate with the CPSC, “voluntarily” recall a product, and offer a repair kit to consumers, than wait for the CPSC to impose harsher action. By cooperating in a “voluntary” recall, a manufacturer can spin its explanation to avert a public relations disaster and can negotiate fines.

Many consumers expressed dismay that 12 children suffered partial finger amputations before Maclaren did anything to prevent more injuries. What hasn’t yet been answered, however, is when Maclaren first learned of a child with a partial finger amputation, or first learned that a child was almost injured (making an actual injury all the more foreseeable), and how long it took the company to report the product defect to the CPSC. We also don’t know how Maclaren obtains and maintains its information on injuries.

Maclaren’s press release reaffirmed the company’s “unwavering commitment to child safety.” One would think a safety conscious manufacturer would want to provide equal protection to children in other countries, yet until consumer outrage sunk in, Maclaren initially was making the repair kits available only for U.S. consumers. The CPSC’s authority does not extend overseas, so Maclaren’s sense of voluntariness didn’t initially extend to countries that lack the United States regulatory protections, even though the strollers sold elsewhere are identical to those sold here. Maclaren says that it has received fewer reports of such injuries in the UK. Could it be that British tikes are themselves more safety conscious? Or, perhaps their fingers are less valuable than those of American children.

From product liability cases we have handled, this writer knows that it is not unusual for manufacturers to set up elaborate mechanisms to avoid learning or disclosing information about product injuries. When injuries do come to the attention of product manufacturers, many record the information in language that emphasizes consumer error in operating the product, not design defects that should have been identified and eliminated by the manufacturer. Sometimes injuries are assigned innocuous injury classifications to mask what really happened.

In the case of one children’s product made by another company, we found that the manufacturer instructed its customer service representatives who fielded consumer telephone calls not to ask if anyone was injured when a product failed. If a parent or caregiver reported an injury, the person was immediately transferred to another department that recorded basic information, but didn’t ask questions to clarify the severity of injuries or how they happened. The consumer wasn’t told that hundreds of other customers experienced the same problem. Reports were toned down to make the events seem innocuous and emphasis was placed on the parent or caregiver not properly operating the product, not on the inherent defect in the product’s design. Then, reports were not passed on to the regulatory people who were responsible for reporting the injuries to the CPSC. Years went by before the company reported the injuries to the CPSC.

This writer has learned of one little girl who suffered a partial index finger amputation long before Maclaren announced the “voluntary” recall. The child’s mother spoke to a customer service representative at Maclaren, but never received a response from the company. It’s doubtful that her complaint was included in the fifteen reports acknowledged by Maclaren.

So, we are left asking, what did Maclaren know and when did the company know it?

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Steven Schafer

Truck Accident Leaves Beef Spilled On Mass. Pike

Chrissie Cole — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:25:00 GMT

Three tractor trailers and one car were involved in a collision on the Massachusetts Turnpike early this morning.

The crash occurred at 2:30 a.m. near the eastbound Weston tolls when a tractor-trailer struck another truck from behind, causing a third truck and a Toyota Corolla to smash into the second truck. The operator of the tollbooth was inside at the time of the crash, but was not injured.

One of the trucks, loaded with sides of beef, overturned strewing meat along the roadway.

The Corolla was wedged beneath one of the trucks. The driver was taken to the hospital with non-life threatening injuries.

By 10:30 a.m., the scene was cleared. To keep traffic moving, motorists were not required to pay tolls.

The investigation is ongoing.

There have been several accidents at the toll plazas in recent years. In August, a man was killed after crashing into the Weston tolls.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Chrissie Cole

Trucking Accident Statistics in Massachusetts

Margaret Embry — Thu, 28 May 2009 14:20:12 GMT

It is estimated that an average of 5,000 Americans are killed each year in tractor-trailer related accidents. In Massachusetts, there were twenty-two fatal accidents involving tractor-trailers in 2008.

The number of large trucks involved in accidents has almost doubled from 2004 to 2007 in Massachusetts, according to data from Road Safe America. In 2004, there were a total of 954 fatal and non-fatal accidents combined and 1,689 in 2007. There were 912 non-fatal accidents in 2004 and 2,228 in 2008. The number of injury accidents has also increased, with 369 in 2004 and 988 in 2008.

The following are some of the causes of trucking accidents, according to Road Safe America:

excessive speed, consumption of drugs and alcohol, failure to use protective measures such as seatbelt and helmets, poor vehicle impact protection, and poor road design.

Also,

trucking safety statistics and a new study on driving behavior found that automobile drivers were to blame 56 percent of the time, truckers 44 percent, according to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, a branch of the U.S. Department of Transportation.

The probability that a truck accident will result in death or serious injury increases with each extra ton of weight over 80,000 lbs.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Margaret Embry

Agreement to waive jury trial against nursing home may not be a good deal for you

Steven Schafer — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 11:08:27 GMT

Admitting a member of your family to a nursing home can be stressful. Your grandparent, parent or spouse often needs immediate health care and attention and they can no longer live on their own, or you can no longer care for them in your home.

It’s a trying period of transition marking a loss of independence for the patient and sadness for the family.

Under these circumstances, it’s not easy focusing on the details of the admissions contract. Yet it’s very important that you do so, particularly if the nursing home demands that the patient waive his or her right to a jury trial in the event of a lawsuit resulting from an injury suffered while in its care.

Unfortunately, this is not uncommon. Long-term care facilities often seek to avoid a lawsuit in court by having a patient or their guardian agree to arbitration, which is an out-of-court proceeding to resolve disputes. Arbitration in and of itself can be beneficial, but preserving your right to a jury trial is very important because it leaves that option open should you decide that’s a better route to take for holding a nursing home accountable for negligent care and getting fair damages for injuries caused by the nursing home.

Some courts have ruled that pre-injury agreements to waive a jury trial are unfair and unenforceable – particularly if signing the agreement is necessary to gain admission to the nursing home, or if the waiver is buried in a multi-page contract and isn’t fully explained by the nursing home.

But some courts have upheld these waivers. In my state, for example, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) enforced an arbitration agreement between a nursing home and the patient’s son, who was acting as his father’s representative under a durable power of attorney.

In Miller vs. Cotter, the court in upholding the agreement emphasized three main factors specific to the case: the waiver agreement was not a condition of being admitted; it was a two-page document separate from the lengthier admissions contract; and the son had a 30-day period to reject the waiver agreement.

Also, the SJC refused to void the agreement as a matter of law. The court said federal and state law favors agreements to arbitrate, unless they are grossly unfair and one-sided. The court decided that jury-trial waivers as part of the admissions process at nursing homes are not unconscionable under law.

Fortunately, the Miller case doesn’t mean that all jury-trial waiver agreements will be upheld in Massachusetts. In another recent case, Constantino vs. Frechette, the Massachusetts Appeals Court ruled that nurses at a long-term care facility could be sued in court for the wrongful death of a patient, even though the facility and patient had agreed to arbitration. The court said the agreement did not specifically cover individual employees.

Allowing nursing homes to avoid jury trials before an injury occurs is arguably a bad public policy. Each injured person’s situation is different. They should have the choice of assessing whether it’s better to have a jury decide the negligence of a nursing home and what damages an injured person should receive, or whether it’s better to have an arbitrator resolve those issues.

Additionally, court rules often give the nursing home resident a better chance to prepare for trial by forcing the nursing home to turn over critical information. Arbitration rules, on the other hand, can favor the nursing home because they don’t always allow for as much investigation and discovery. An intelligent assessment of these factors can’t be made before the injury even occurs, or before the resident ever gets advice from a nursing home negligence lawyer.

A potential problem for health care consumers following a decision like the SJC’s ruling in the Cotter case is that other health care providers might start demanding jury-trial waivers. What’s to stop a hospital emergency room from making treatment available only if a patient agrees to arbitration in the event of malpractice? Or what if HMOs or primary care physicians start demanding jury waivers?

Even if medical treatment isn’t conditioned on signing an arbitration agreement, is it reasonable to assume most patients will even understand the full implications of waiving their right to a jury trial – especially when they are more focused on the illness or injury that brought them to the emergency room or their doctor’s office?

Bottom line: If you face having to admit a member of your family into a nursing home, it’s important to take the time to understand what’s in the admissions contract, including any provision requiring you to waive your right to a jury trial pre-injury.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Steven Schafer

Bedrails can kill patients

Steven Schafer — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 10:27:36 GMT

Despite federal safety regulations and an increased awareness of the dangers of using bedrails at long-term care facilities and hospitals, patients continue to die from suffocation, strangulation or asphyxiation.

How do these tragedies occur?

One way is when patients slip through a gap between the mattress and the bottom of the raised bedrail, their heads get stuck, and they strangle to death. Sometimes their bodies are compressed causing asphyxiation. Or patients suffocate when they get wedged between the bedrail and the side of the mattress, with their faces pressed against the mattress. These hideous entrapment deaths usually occur with elderly patients. As long ago as 1995, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a Safety Alert to hospitals and nursing homes warning about entrapment hazards and safety concerns that accompany the use of bed rails.

I’m currently handling a case involving the strangulation death of an 87-year-old Massachusetts woman in 2006. The woman slid off her nursing home bed, and caught her chin on the raised bedrail. Her head became wedged between the bed rail, mattress and bed frame, with the rest of her body in a sitting position toward the floor, causing asphyxiation.

The Massachusetts Department of Public Health concluded that the woman’s mattress pad alarm and personal safety alarm had not sounded to alert the nursing staff that the woman was in distress. Nonetheless, the woman’s tragic death could have been prevented if the nursing home had taken the proper steps to identify and eliminate the risk of entrapment hazards associated with bedrails.

Compounding these tragedies is the fact that they could have been easily avoided. Long-term care facilities and hospitals can take relatively easy and inexpensive steps to protect patients from these dangers.

For example, they can install cushions to fill the gap between mattress and bedrail, much like bumpers used in a baby crib. As an alternative, they can install see-through netting to fill the gap, which provides patients better visibility from their beds. Another safeguard is to simply use thicker mattresses to eliminate the gap.

Nursing homes and hospitals have used bedrails for decades with the intention of restraining patients from falling out of bed and suffering injuries. However, medical studies actually show that bedrails can increase the likelihood of falls as elderly patients try to crawl over or around them. A safer option is to simply place a patient in a bed low to the floor with safety mats next to the bed, and avoid using bedrails altogether.

Some long-term care facilities and hospitals increase the potential for injuries and death by “mixing and matching” beds, mattresses and bedrails from different manufacturers, causing unsafe integration of bed parts. Not only that, nurses and nursing assistants often receive inadequate training on the proper use of bedrails, and effective monitoring of patients.

A related problem is that the cause of death is often misdiagnosed because the suffocation can result from a gentle compression of the body or covering of the nose and mouth. The trauma often associated with strangulation, such as bruising of the neck or a fractured hyoid bone, which lay at the base of the tongue, is not always present or may not be identified.

An even larger potential problem is that long-term care facilities and hospitals either destroy or alter their medical records (more often than you’d like to believe), which makes it harder to prove their negligence in the use of bedrails and monitoring of patients.

The sad truth remains that bedrails can cause more problems than they solve. There’s often no need to use them, yet they are continuing to be used, and people are dying or suffering serious injuries as a result.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Steven Schafer

Freight Train and Commuter Train Collide, Over 200 Injured

Jenny Albano — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 22:54:38 GMT

On Tuesday afternoon a freight train rolled from a side track onto the main line and collided with a commuter train that was stationary injuring over 200 people. Around 150 people were treated on scene and another 80 were taken to local hospitals. None of the injuries were life-threatening and the majority were minor. There were about 300 passengers on the Stoughton-bound train.

Pesaturo said the CSX freight car, loaded with lumber, rolled about two miles from where it had been parked at a lumber yard on the siding. It traveled onto the Stoughton commuter rail branch line, then onto the main line where it struck the passenger train's locomotive near Canton Junction just before 5:30 p.m. Pesaturo said the engineer, who was among those injured, was alerted by a track signal that something was on the line and was able to stop the commuter train before the crash.

Authorities are investigating to find out how the freight train became loose. The train was number 917 and left from Boston's South Station at 4:40 p.m.

Passengers involved in the crash said that the train suddenly stopped at the Canton Junction and then there was a loud bang. Also, a small brush fire ignited outside of the train and there was dust filling up the train car. Passengers were flying down the aisles and people had fallen on the floor. According to the passengers it was a terrifying experience.

The train service resumed Tuesday night from Boston and Providence, R.I,, but passengers had to be bused from Canton to Stoughton because crews were still cleaning up the debris from the accident.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Jenny Albano

Class Action Lawsuit Filed Against Hannaford for Data Breach

Chrissie Cole — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 19:18:31 GMT

A class action lawsuit was recently filed against Hannaford Bros. on behalf of the consumers whose credit card and debit card numbers were stolen when the company's computers were hacked.

The lawsuit was filed Wednesday, in the U.S. District Court in Portland and claims the supermarket chain was negligent in providing adequate computer data security.

The class action lawsuit follows a security breach that compromised 4.2 million credit card and debit cards leading to over 1,800 fraud cases.

Hannaford discovered the breach on February 27, upon further investigating they found the data breach began on December 7 and wasn't contained until March 10.

All 165 Hannaford stores located in New England and New York were affected, as well as 106 Sweetbay stores in Florida.

While this security breach is ranked as one of the largest in U.S. history, it is smaller than the 45.7 million credit and debit cards that were exposed at TJX Cos., in 2005.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Chrissie Cole

Pool Drain Lawsuit Filed Because of Drowning

Jenny Albano — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 16:31:29 GMT

Parents of a boy who drowned filed a lawsuit Monday, January 28 against the town of Greenwich, Shoreline Pools, and others. The 6 year-old drowned when his arm became caught in a powerful swimming pool drain. The lawsuit, by Brian and Karen Cohn, alleges that the pool safety violates safety requirements that were instated after many similar tragedies.

The lawsuit, which seeks damages of more than $15,000, alleges Shoreline had a history of violating building code requirements and accuses the town of failing to conduct a proper inspection before issuing a permit.

Zachary, the 6 year-old boy, became trapped after his arm became stuck in the intake valve on the wall at the deep end of the pool. When the water enters the intake valve there is a great amount of suction. When he became trapped on July 26, 2007, the father and another adult jumped in to try and save him, but unfortunately the suction from the intake valve was to strong.

The boy's parents could not find a mechanism to turn off the suction pump, so Karen Cohn ran and shut off power to the house, including the pool's drain pump. Brian Cohn was then able to free his son and perform CPR, but it was too late.

According to the lawsuit, there have been more than 150 reported drain entrapments since 1985 and over 48 deaths. There have also been other serious injuries such as disembowelment. In 2004, Connecticut made new safety requirements for pool circulation systems.

The lawsuit states that the swimming pool the boy drowned in did not live up to the minimum safety standards and that there are seven code violations that could cause entrapment.

For more information on this subject, please refer to our section on Wrongful Death.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Jenny Albano