Lives shattered in driveway backover accidents

updated 11:50 a.m. ET June 24, 2007

RICHARDSON, Texas - It was Adrianna’s day to go shopping at the mall, and her mom was looking forward to it. Mother and daughter alone together.

Just three weeks before, Rachel Clemens’ own mother had died after a long illness and in the past week she’d organized her son Andrew’s seventh birthday party. She and her husband, David, had taken Adrianna and Andrew bowling with his friends and a couple of them had spent the night.

The next day, Oct. 9, 2004, a Saturday, would be Adrianna’s day, although for this family it would forever be linked with tragedy.

David had made breakfast for everyone and cleaned up while Rachel and 2-year-old Adrianna took a bath.

“I was blow-drying my hair,” Rachel recalls. “I flipped my hair over. I looked up and she wasn’t there.” Adrianna probably went upstairs to see her brother and his friends, she thought.

Then she heard David’s screams.

He had told her he was going to move their SUV so he could get into a storage area above the garage ceiling to retrieve some decorations for Halloween.

“Adrianna must have come out of the kitchen and out to the garage,” she says. “And he backed out.”

Little Adrianna was hit by a 2½-ton mass of steel.

Their precious little girl, whose raven hair and dark eyes resembled her mother’s, was gone. She was pronounced dead at the hospital.

Adrianna was one of more than 1,200 children under 15 who were killed since 2000 in nontraffic motor vehicle accidents in the United States. Half of those fatalities were in backovers, almost all of them involving children under 5, according to Kids and Cars, a child safety advocacy group in Leawood, Kan.

Each week, at least two children are killed and another 50 are hurt in backover accidents. Over three days in April, six children were killed; by the end of the month, 11 more died, the group said.

Rear cameras and audible warning sensors, technology that could reduce the number of fatalities, are not considered safety equipment by automakers and are offered only as optional parking aids in most vehicles. It could be years before they become as ubiquitous as seat belts.

Grief compounded
“Everybody says the worst thing that could ever happen is the death of a child,” says Janette Fennell, the advocacy group’s founder and president. “What’s different in these, in over 70 percent of the cases, it’s a direct relative of the child that’s behind the wheel — mom or dad, grandma or grandpa, aunt or uncle.”

Losing a child, compounded by unimaginable guilt over who was responsible for the accident, leaves families traumatized and immobilized in their grief. With no easy answers for why it happened to their child or their family, anger and blame often are misdirected. The strain on relationships can be tremendous.

Rachel and David believed they’d taken all the precautions to protect their children. They had installed a fence around the backyard swimming pool, with a gate latch high enough so the kids couldn’t reach it. But when they purchased their Infiniti QX4, they were coaxed into getting a sunroof. No mention was made of rear cameras that could help them see better as they back up, Rachel says.

“My husband and I were comatose for months” after Adrianna died, Rachel says, and she still appears broken and frail, seated in an overstuffed chair in the den of their suburban Dallas home.

On the beige walls of the converted bedroom she calls her “safety haven” are family snapshots and studio photos of Adrianna, one depicting her as an angel.

“I have to have her all around me,” Rachel says. “I feel her with me when I’m in here. I feel her closeness.”

She hung poster-size images of Adrianna on one wall but David couldn’t bear to look at them so Rachel put them away.

David still won’t speak publicly about that day. Two-and-a-half years later, his anguish is still too raw.

“You have a name on you now and it’s a horrible feeling,” Rachel says. “We’re not just the Clemenses. We’re ’the ones.’ My husband, it took him years before he could even walk down the street. You just feel like everybody looks at you, pointing to you.

“It’s not that they don’t want to talk to us. They don’t know what to say,” she says. “As a grieving parent, my advice is not say anything, just let us talk. That’s the best comfort you can give us.”

Adrianna and Andrew already were the best of friends, two peas in a pod, their mother called them, yet strikingly different personalities. Andrew is the sensitive one, “more protector than anything else,” Rachel says. Adrianna was outgoing, fearless.

“Nothing would get by her,” Rachel says. “She’d let you know. She’d defend Andrew in front of his friends and Andrew’s friends would cry because Adrianna would yell at them.”

'Bye-bye syndrome'
“How could it happen?” Rachel asks, but she finds little comfort in any explanation.

Fennell calls it “bye-bye syndrome.” A parent says they’re running out briefly. The child hears “bye-bye” and decides, “I want to go bye-bye, too.”

“They sneak out. They can see the car. ... They have no idea they’re putting themselves in harm’s way,” Fennell says.

It’s been almost five years, and Greg Gulbransen has begun to forgive himself for his very human mistake.

A pediatrician from Syosset, N.Y., Greg believes he and his wife, Leslie, did all the right things. They childproofed their Long Island home and researched the safest SUV for their two sons, Scott, 5, and 2-year-old Cameron, before settling on a BMW X5.

One evening, Oct. 19, 2002, Greg went out to park the truck with the rear facing their condominium. Street traffic could be heavy in the morning when he left for work.

“I remember explicitly driving that car from the street into the driveway that night,” he says. “I was backing it in between parked cars on the driveway. I was going very slowly. I didn’t want to hit anything. I was looking through the rearview mirrors, looking over my shoulder.

“I felt a bump. The bump was at the front wheel. I was going backward. What was down there — 9:30 at night? The newspaper wasn’t there yet. As the car went back farther, my son was in the headlights.”

It was Cameron.

“He opened and closed the door for the first and last time in his life,” his father says. “I administered CPR in the driveway. I had my stethoscope in my hand. He was bleeding through his nose, through his ears. He died on the driveway. They tell me he died in the hospital.

“I know he died in my arms.”

Greg says he was “numb” for a year.

“When people realize a conservative, well-educated, middle-aged pediatrician taking all the necessary safety measures, who spends his days and nights helping families stay safe and healthy, accidentally backs over and kills his son, then it’s time to realize backover injuries are real,” he says.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, in a report to Congress in November, said backover accidents are not a recent phenomenon. But NHTSA disputes perceptions that the number of accidents is increasing as the size of the nation’s vehicle fleet grows — led by SUVs and minivans, which tend to have larger rear blind zones.

A study by Consumer Reports magazine suggests SUVs, pickups and minivans are longer and taller and their blind zones extend as much as 50 feet from the rear bumper. These factors contribute to poor visibility, the report says.

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