LEAWOOD, Kan. - A Leawood mom will be in Washington D.C. Monday with the victims of car accidents. Not accidents on the road but fatal and severe accidents that have occured in the backseats of millions of cars.
She's been successful in getting Congress to mandate all kinds of safety features in vehicles and she hopes to save lives again.
"It doesn't make any sense that little ones have to lose their lives from a known danger" says Janette Fennell.
Fennell has dedicated the past 12 years of her life to get Congress to require automated reversing windows.
When a body part gets in the way of a passenger window, she wants them to automatically to go back down.
Fennell says, "You might think as a mom and say 'all hands in and close the windows' and you think everyone complied and someone didn't."
She says car windows have 40 to 80 pounds of force when they go up but it only takes about 20 pounds of force to break the trachea of a young child.
Several years ago this week an Anthony, Kansas toddler Zoie Gates died when she leaned out the car window to talk to a dog.
She put her knee on the toggle power window switch.
The window went up and it took her with it.
Still, the National Highway Traffic Safety administration has proposed not to require the automatic revere feature on new vehicles, citing 6 deaths and nearly 2,000 injuries a year.
But Fennell says 2 new, nationwide polls found something dramatically different:
"Millions, millions of injuries where someone else in that vehicle put the window up and hurt another person."
She hopes it's enough evidence to create a new standard on all power windows.
"Can you imagine what (Zoie's mom) would feel like knowing for just $6 the manufacturer of the vehicle her daughter was in, put that in and she'd be alive today?"
Fennell says automated reverse technology has been around since the 1980's.
But the automakers have argued the new up and down power window switches Fennell got mandated a few years ago make car windows safe enough.
