Andrew Warner was driving his family home from a Christmas party near Houston when they were rear-ended by a drunk driver. Warner’s seat buckled, slamming backward into his infant daughter, Taylor. She suffered massive brain trauma and died less than a day later.
In the decade since his child’s death, Warner has learned that what happened to Taylor was no freak accident. While relatively rare, seatback failures have been injuring and killing people for decades. According to one estimate, roughly 50 children have been killed each year since 2001 in rear-end crashes, and experts say that some of those fatalities were likely from front seats collapsing backwards.