Life turned upside down for the mother of a two-year-old child when she found her son’s small body crushed under an IKEA dresser that had fallen on him.
Since the death of their son, the parents of the deceased child, have moved forward with a wrongful death lawsuit against Ikea. The dresser had been purchased at a nearby Ikea store. The MALM chest came without any hardware to secure it to the wall. The couple alleges that IKEA was aware that the dresser presented a tip-over hazard and allege that Ikea’s negligence played a role in the wrongful death of their son. USA Today, a front runner in reporting this news item, states that ‘Ikea says it knows of reports of three additional deaths since 1989 from tip-overs involving other models of Ikea chests and dressers.’
The Ikea product being attacked in this case is the MALM dresser. The Ikea MALM dresser comes in multiple styles – two drawers, three drawers, four drawers, and six drawers. They also come in chest and dresser styles.
The Swedish furniture manufacturer now has offered a kit that contains hardware that would secure the chest to the wall to prevent further tip-over accidents and deaths. This kit is free and can be obtained by visiting your local Ikea store or by calling (888) 966-4532. The chests taller than 29.5 inches are eligible to obtain the kit for free. You can go directly to the Ikea website for more information here. While IKEA has officially recalled the MALM dresser. The recall is associated not with the return of the dresser but in obtaining the kit.) They have also produced a video with safety tips.
The mother states that her blog, www.HeavenHasAHero.com, serves two purposes. One, it helps her keep the memory of her son alive. But more importantly, she has a message to other parents and furniture manufacturers. ” She writes, ‘Bolt EVERYTHING down. Dressers, bookshelves, TVs, anything that could possibly fall.’ She urges furniture manufacturers to include the anchors necessary to bolt furniture down.
In addition to the death of the young boy, it is believed that another child, also about two years old, died in Snohomish, WA when his body became trapped underneath a MALM 3 drawer chest in June 2014.
Wrongful death suits in regards to furniture tip-overs are common. Sadly, every two weeks a child dies from a furniture tip-over incident. A child is injured approximately every 24 minutes from a furniture or TV tip over. (Data compiled by CPSC.)
If your child has been injured or killed in a furniture tip-over incident and you’d like to better understand your rights, you are more than welcome to call me, Edward Smith, a California personal injury attorney, at (800) 404-5400 or (916) 921-6400.
My office was established in the 1980s and since then we have handled hundreds of wrongful death claims. If you have questions about wrongful death claims, I try and answer as many as possible on my website. You can call my office for a free consultation.
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Photo Attribution: By User Senil anka on sv.wikipedia (Foto: Daniel S.) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons