May 13, 2009 5:23 pm US/Central
Family Sues After Garage Door Crushes Boy
Dijion Sanders, 6, Was Killed In Saturday Incident
CHICAGO (CBS) ―
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Dijion Sanders, 6, was crushed by an electric garage door.
CBS
It's something you probably do every day: open and close your garage door. But is your garage door safe? CBS 2's Kristyn Hartman reports that one Chicago family realized there was something terribly wrong with theirs when it was too late.
The pictures show Dijion Sanders to be just the little boy his father described, a smiling, happy 6-year-old boy. He last saw him Saturday.
"He said, 'Dad, you have a good day now, make sure you come back home,'" said victim's father Marshall Sanders. "Well, I came back home and my son wasn't there."
The father received the heartbreaking news his son died. Dijion had been playing outside, and somehow, it's not clear yet, the
electric garage door crushed him.
His older brother Deangelo found Dijion and got their mother.
"His face was blue," said victim's mother Angela Washington-Sanders. "We don't want this to happen to anyone else ever again."
Angela and Marshall Sanders filed suit against the maker of the garage door, the company that installed it and the relative who owned it.
Their attorney boiled it down to one simple statement:
"No child should be crushed by a garage door in the year 2009," said Attorney Tim Cavanagh.
The owner of Robert's Garage Pros, Robert Faught, who has nothing to do with this case, said: "There's a lot of new products that are available to prevent people from being injured by garage doors."
But not everybody has them, and what they do have, they often take for granted. For example, one model has a safety eye to detect motion at a low level. There's a problem though.
"It's a couple inches too high," Faught said. "If someone were laying down under here, the sensor would not pick it up, the door would come down on them and possibly cause harm to that person."
But the door has a back-up protective measure: an automatic reversing system.
CBS 2 tested it with a melon. In theory, even with the eye set high, if the door hits the melon, it should bounce back up.
When it touched the object in its way, the garage door went back up.
It might not have, though, if the "force setting" on the actual unit hadn't been in the right position. If it had been set too high, the 350-pound door likely would have crushed the melon.
"Something that you're walking under and pulling in and out of on a daily basis should be looked at just to make sure that it's safe," Faught said. "Because the average person has no idea how something like this works."
Faught recommends a garage door check once a year. He says safety eyes or sensors have been the mandatory standard since the late '90s, and automatic reversing systems have been around a couple of decades.
That said, the Consumer Product Safety Commission says automatic garage doors are to blame for 2,800 emergency room visits each year.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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