Text sent to husband about car seat may have saved baby

When Rebecca Tafaro Boyer’s husband texted her a photo showing their nearly 3-month-old son asleep in his car seat, she noticed something was wrong.

“That chest clip isn’t high enough or nearly tight enough,” she replied, providing instructions on how he should adjust it. Boyer said her husband never responded, but she assumed he did what he usually does when she’s “nagging” him.

“He was probably laughing at me,” Boyer, of Memphis, Tennessee, said Friday. “Whenever I bring something like that up, he usually says, ‘OK, honey,’ rolls his eyes and then does it anyway.”

Minutes later, Boyer said, David Boyer and their son, William, were involved in a car accident. David Boyer broke his right foot in three places. William never even woke up, his mother said.

Mrs. Boyer said she wrote about their experience last month on Facebook “because I was so relieved that he had fixed the car seat and that it had worked properly. It’s rare that you hear a story like this and it’s good news.”

The post has been shared more than 35,000 times.

Mrs. Boyer, a nurse at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, said it was her first day back to work since their son was born, and she had asked her husband to send her regular updates — not because she didn’t trust him but because she was “upset” about leaving their baby.

So David Boyer sent an afternoon update, showing their infant asleep in his car seat and texting: “Little man is out. We are running errands today.” His wife quickly responded. Mrs. Boyer said it was exactly 15 minutes later when she received a panicked call from her husband. He and William were less than three miles from their home when a woman pulled in front of them, Mrs. Boyer wrote, forcing her husband to slam on the brakes at “nearly 50 miles per hour.” The cars crashed into each other, but the Boyers’ son was unharmed.

“My precious little bundle of joy was so well restrained in his car seat, THAT HE DIDN’T EVEN WAKE UP,” she wrote.

Boyer said she rushed to the scene and the first thing she asked was, “Did you fix the car seat?”

The answer, she said, was “yes.”