Sandy Garner didn’t like the looks of most of the booster seats she saw on store shelves. Accustomed to having her 4-year-old daughter, Hannah, secure in a child seat with a full harness, Garner was nervous about graduating into a booster seat that relied only on an adult seat belt for protection.
The Carmi, Ill., mother settled on a Gerry Double Guard, a booster seat without a back that has a shield, kind of like a bar, that comes across the front of the child. She liked the name, Double Guard, because it gave her the impression that she was “going a little further in safety.” Hannah was in the seat when she was killed two years ago.
“The primary reason we purchased that seat over any other booster seat was this one was promoting how the lap belt was integrated into the seat, and that supposedly tightened across the legs and would keep them in the seat,” Garner said.
The Double Guard was rated for kids 30 pounds to 60 pounds, and 38-pound Hannah was starting to outgrow the child seat with a full harness for kids up to 40 pounds. What Garner had no way of knowing is that “shield boosters” are widely considered the appendix of child seat safety —— they no longer have a meaningful role.
Shield boosters used to be considered the best choice in one narrow situation —— when a car had only lap belts and the only other option was putting a toddler over 40 pounds in a seat belt. But now they are no longer allowed for that, either. That’s because they don’t pass crash tests with updated test dummies designed to better reflect the impact on larger children.
Shield boosters are discouraged, even though manufacturers continue to sell them, because they provide no upper torso restraint and there have been a number of cases of ejection or spinal cord injury in serious crashes involving them.
“I wouldn’t touch a shield booster with a 10-foot pole,” said Joseph Colella, a child seat advocate in Germantown, Md., who teaches NHTSA’’s course on correct use of child seats.
Stephanie Tombrello, executive director of SafetyBeltSafe, said safety advocates always were concerned about shield boosters. “We always had them the lowest recommendation,” she said.““There really is no purpose for a shield booster if it can’t contain a child over 40 pounds.”
On Oct. 8, 1996, on a country road about three miles from their home, Garner’s minivan was broadsided. The force of the collision caused Garner’s minivan to tip over, and when it skidded to a stop, Garner looked down and saw through a smashed window that Hannah was underneath the van. It was like an angel had come in and laid her peacefully on the ground,” her mother said. Instead, Hannah had been ejected from the seat and her neck was broken.
“She relied on me to pick out something to keep her safe and she trusted me,” Garner said. “Something that’s only safe when you’re hit forward or from the rear is not safe. “If they had told me there was a problem with it, I never would have bought it to begin with. I just didn’t know. I chose the one thing in the world that didn’t keep her safe.”
—— Lisa Zagaroli, Detroit News