Infant ‘saved’ by carseat

Press, 29 December 1989, Page 5

Infant ‘saved’ by carseat

PA Hamilton Hamilton ambulance officers are praising infant carseats after a seven-month-old boy escaped unscathed from a road crash which killed two people yesterday. The child was harnessed into the baby seat in a car involved in a head-on collision with another car on State highway 1 south of Horotiu just before 4 p.m. Two Auckland women died in the accident. A woman with serious neck and head injuries and a man and a woman with moderate injuries were taken toWaikato Hospital.

The dead women were the driver of one of the cars, aged 58, and a passenger, aged 64. Their names were not available because they had not been formally identified. A St John Ambulance officer, Mark Lovich, who attended the accident, said although the infant suffered “extreme shock,” the seat protected him from any injuries. “If that kid hadn’t been strapped in, he would have been catapulted through the windscreen or into the back of the front seats. He would have been history,” he said.

Mr Lovich said the three injured people, who were travelling north in one of the cars with the child, also owed their lives to seat belts. A seat belt caused the moderate chest injuries to one of the women taken to hospital but they were less serious than they might have been without the seatbelt, he said. The ambulance service also praised bystanders who gave the victims first aid until ambulance officers arrived.

“They did a fantastic job and it’s not often you see that,” Mr Lovich said.