The video is chilling. It’s a nanny-cam’s-eye-view of two-year-old twins playing on a white double dresser. As they begin climbing onto the open drawers, the dresser topples over on them, slamming both to the ground and trapping one’s upper body and head underneath it.
It’s not an Ikea dresser, but it shows how dresser overturns happen, and how it’s possible that the overturns of dressers in Ikea’s Malm furniture line have now resulted in the deaths of eight children.
The latest death, of a two-year-old boy in California in May 2017, happened after he was put down for a nap.
The first death from an Ikea dresser occurred in 1989. Ikea has now received 186 reports of incidents with the Malm dressers, 91 of them involving injuries to children, as well as 113 reports involving other dressers, 53 of them involving injuries.
Ikea first recalled the dressers in June of 2016, e-mailing 13 million customers and offering full refunds or anchoring kits to attach the dressers to the wall. In December of that year, it agreed to a $50 million settlement with three of the families whose children had been crushed by the falling dressers.
But some say that the company has not been vigorous enough in spreading the word of the recall. Some one million dressers have been serviced or had their purchase price refunded, out of an estimated 17.3 million sold in the US. Ikea has now issued a second recall.
Dresser tip-overs are a problem. The Consumer Products Safety Commission reports 514 fatalities involving furniture and/or television tip-overs between 2000 and 2016. Not all of the victims were children: 18 were adults, aged 28-59, and 65 were seniors, aged 60 years and older. The organization estimates that some 30,000 people are treated in emergency rooms each year for injuries from these kinds of incidents.
We’re investigating to see if a class action is appropriate. If you have experienced an Ikea dresser overturn, fill out the form on this page and let us know what happened.
Article Type: InvestigationTopic: Consumer