From Newsday:

The push for new vehicle safety laws

BRYN NELSON

February 26, 2006

Their stories all begin the same way: An unseen toddler. A parent or relative backing up a sport utility vehicle. And then the awful discovery.

Since October 2002, three similar accidents on Long Island have ended in a child's death and a fourth nearly so. But out of unspeakable tragedy, several parents have found their voices and made the Island a focal point in the push for better car safety laws.

"When you go through the trauma of it as a parent, there are no words t explain it," says Oyster Bay pediatrician Dr. Greg Gulbransen. "It's just shock."

Gulbransen and his wife, Leslie, lost their 2-year-old son Cameron on Oct. 19, 2002, when the toddler slipped unnoticed behind the family's BMW X5 sport utility vehicle as Greg was backing it into their Woodbury driveway for the night.

Since then, he has recounted his story dozens of times - something he hates doing but continues out of concern for what he views as an epidemic.

"I don't want anyone to go through my story," he says.

Others already have.

Bill and Adriann Nelson's son Alec was only 16 months old when a relative backing a Ford Explorer out of the family's Dix Hills driveway accidentally killed the toddler on April 24, 2004. Two months later, 2-year-old Agatha Cavallaro died after her father accidentally backed over the toddler in a Ford Expedition during a family outing in Muttontown.

The Nelsons have since joined the Gulbransens in organizing fundraisers and pressing for more awareness of backover accidents, a phenomenon barely on the radar of safety advocates in the late '90s.

"The number one thing we were dealing with back then was kids being left alone in hot cars," says Janette Fennell, founder and president of the nonprofit group Kids And Cars.

Backovers now account for more than half of the fatalities she tracks, with more than 100 in each of the past two years. Fennell believes the real toll is two or three times higher.

The rising numbers, she says, have tracked the popularity of SUVs, minivans and pickup trucks, some of which have "blind zones" that extend more than 40 feet behind the rear bumper for shorter drivers.

Most victims are toddlers, too young to recognize the danger but old enough to run into the driveway when separation anxiety compels them. Fennell calls it the "bye-bye syndrome," but a lack of good statistics has made the problem hard to quantify.

That may change. In last year's national transportation bill, advocates succeeded in inserting language requiring the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration to gather data on backovers and on ways of preventing them.

Last May, Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford) co-introduced the "Cameron Gulbransen Kids And Cars Safety Act of 2005," which would require automobile manufacturers to make safety measures such as backup warning systems standard in all new cars. On Halloween, with the Long Island Children's Museum and costumed trick-or-treaters as a backdrop, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) announced her co-sponsorship of a similar bill in the Senate.

As supporters work to gather more co-sponsors, Gulbransen envisions a different story he'd like to tell. It's about going to a car dealership when his two children are old enough to drive and seeing back-up safety features on every single car.

And then he'd tell them that their brother Cameron helped to make it all a reality.