Furniture deaths spur IKEA to issue warning
Furniture maker IKEA is offering repair kits for 27 million chests and dressers after a number of children were killed or injured by the furniture when it tipped over on them.
Two-year-old Curren Collas was one of those cases. He had beautiful blue eyes and a sweet laugh. Curren died in February of 2014 when an IKEA dresser fell on him.
Alan Feldman is now representing the Collas family in a civil lawsuit against IKEA.
"This is a problem, a concern, and it is long past the time when companies like IKEA address the problem," Feldman said.
Curren was the second reported death in 2014. Since 1989, there have been a total of five known deaths related to this dresser.
"Many times, this is not the parents' fault," Elliot Kaye explained.
Kaye is Chairman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission. He says this may not be a new problem, but it's a growing one.
"It's the one-year-old to six-year-old, usually, who is curious, who is mobile enough to move around, and has the strength to pull himself up and unfortunately the unit comes down on them," said Kaye.
Every year emergency rooms see an average of 38,000 tip-over injuries. That includes televisions and furniture. In a span of two years, 2011-2013, 360 children died from tip-overs.
"There's that risk calculation of, I have to attend something else extremely important, sometimes it's another child, and that's unfortunately when this can happen, which is why we want consumers to anchor these products when they can," said Kaye.
In a statement IKEA said they are "committed to helping raise the awareness of this serious home safety issue."
The company is providing customers with tools and instructions on how to attach their furniture to a wall.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission is spending over $400,000 on an education campaign aimed at getting parents to anchor their furniture, when possible. But they are also challenging the furniture industry to do more by changing the design of their furniture to be more child-friendly.