I found my baby girl dead in ‘ticking timebomb’ cot
Mum tells inquest of tragedy
A MUM fought back tears yesterday as she described finding her sevenweek-old baby dead in her cot.
Grace Roseman became trapped on the edge of a Bednest crib, which has foldable sides to allow it to be placed next to a bed.
Her mum, Esther, described the £199 cot as a “timebomb” at an inquest.
She said: “I found Grace with her head hanging over the side, facing upwards.
“Her head was on the side which was half-folded. She was purple in colour.
“It was obvious she had been there some time. There was no sign of any life.”
Esther had put Grace down for a nap and left the side of the cot halfway down.
She said: “I never put it up. It was set up like that and that was how I was using it. But when Grace started developing, it was becoming a timebomb.”
Esther returned to the bedroom to find Grace’s lifeless body. Her husband, Gideon, described the horrific moment, in April 2015. He said “Esther started screaming, ‘Grace is dead’. I did see that Grace was gone. Blood was starting to pool.”
Gideon rushed Grace from their home in Haywards Heath, West Sussex, to hospital, where she was pronounced dead.
Esther, who had been loaned the crib, said: “It is a shame the instructions were not on the side of the cot.”
After Grace’s death, West Sussex senior coroner, Penelope Schofield, wrote to Bednest, saying: “Urgent action should be taken to prevent future deaths.”
In a report sent to the firm and the National Childbirth Trust, she wrote: “If the cot side is not safe to be incompletely lowered, it should be questioned whether these should be options available at all.”
The inquest heard in the UK the legal minimum height between a cot mattress and the top of its wall is 200mm. But Peter Norman, Bednest company secretary, admitted when the cot’s side was folded, the height was 115mm. He said the sides were not supposed to be partially lowered if the baby was unsupervised.
Mr Norman told the hearing: “It did not seem feasible. It might be conceivable that an older child, five or six months old, could get over the side, but we were shocked.”
Bednest recalled the cot in the US, but a new model, whose sides cannot be partially lowered, is for sale here. A modification kit to stop the older version’s sides from being partially lowered is available.
The inquest in Horsham continues.