Andrew Hartung: Dogged dad's persistence results in a crib recall

Early one morning in September 2007 Andrew Hartung and his wife Carolyn of Manalapan, N.J. awoke to a sound no parent wants to hear: shrieks of pain from their 14-month-old daughter Abigail.

The Hartungs looked at the video baby monitor in their bedroom and quickly realized something was wrong with the baby's crib. They rushed into her room and found Abigail with her fingers trapped in a gap between the top rails.

After freeing his daughter, Andrew Hartung inspected the crib and discovered the bolts at the corners of the crib had come loose, creating the gap. Upon closer inspection, he discovered that the bolt holes had been drilled too closely to the edge, causing the wood to split.

Fearful that other children would become entrapped in similar cribs, Hartung called the company that distributed them, Bassettbaby, a unit of the well-known furniture maker Bassett. He said that a Bassettbaby vice president told him that his was the only complaint the company had received about the crib and that it was not going to take any action to notify other consumers who might have bought one, part of a Wendy Bellisimo Collection line sold exclusively at Babies 'R' Us.

“That made me mad,” says Hartung. “That was a big mistake on their part.”

Suspecting the company was not telling him the truth, Hartung contacted the Consumer Product Safety Commission. According to the CPSC, Bassettbaby had already received 85 reports of bolts loosening on the cribs, including one report of a 13-month-old child's hand becoming trapped between the railings.

Hartung didn’t stop there. He contacted children's-product designer Wendy Bellisimo’s company. A few days later, Hartung said, Bellisimo’s husband called back and said they had not heard anything about any problems with the cribs and that they were “horrified” by what he had told them.

A few weeks after the Hartung incident, a CPSC investigator came to their house and took away the faulty crib. And a month later the CPSC announced a recall of 8,900 of the cribs and cautioned parents to stop using them.

Bassettbaby has since issued two other recalls of Wendy Bellisimo cribs.  All of the recalled cribs were manufactured in China and sold exclusively at Babies 'R' Us. In February, 18 cribs were recalled because spindles on the drop-side of the crib could loosen creating a gap that poses an entrapment and strangulation hazard.  And in June, 550 more cribs were recalled because the space between the spindles on some failed to meet federal standards and could pose an entrapment hazard.

When contacted this week, Bassettbaby spokesperson Angela Mize said the company would not comment on any of the recalls or on Hartung's story.

This past August young Abigail and her family traveled to Washington to attend a Congressional signing ceremony for a landmark product-safety bill, part of which requires the CPSC to study and develop safety standards for infant and toddler products including cribs. The legislation was pushed through with the help of hundreds of citizen consumer advocates like Hartung.

In a fitting coda, at the end of the ceremony House Speaker Nancy Pelosi handed Abigail one of the pens used to sign the legislation.