What happens when an innocent game of hide and seek turns into a wrongful death? That is exactly the problem when children decide to hide in the trunk of a car.
High temperatures and poor ventilation add up to cause extremely high temperatures in your trunk. Your car’s trunk can still heat up to dangerous temperatures in cooler temperatures.
An outside temperature in the mid 60s can cause your automobile’s temperature to rise above 110 degrees. The inside of your car can rise 20 degrees within the first ten minutes after parking. High temperatures could cause wrongful death from heatstroke, and younger children are especially sensitive to heatstroke.
As personal injury lawyers, we handle many cases of children’s injuries from car accidents. While we hate to see any child injured, it is doubly worse when these injuries occur when the car is not even in motion, like in the case of a child trapped in a trunk.
Heatstroke and other heat related conditions can potentially cause permanent damage to a child. If your child does have any kind of lingering condition that comes with high medical bill costs, you may have no idea how to get those medical bills paid. You’re in luck. Our personal injury lawyers have a resource page that can help you get information about getting your medical bills paid.
Thankfully, as of September 1, 2001, auto makers are required to install glow in the dark trunk releases on the inside of the trunk compartments. If your car was made before that date, you should your local auto dealership about getting a glow in the dark trunk release installed. Be sure to show your child how to use the trunk release because you never know when that handy device will save your child from wrongful death.
Here are the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s tips to avoid children’s injuries from trunk entanglement:
- Teach your child not to play in or around automobiles.
- Teach your child that the trunk is not to ever be played in.
- Always supervise your child carefully when in or around automobiles.
- Check the trunk of your car is your child ever goes missing.
- Lock your car/trunk and always make sure keys or remote entry devices are out of reach of children.
- Keep the rear fold-down seats closed and/or locked to keep your child from climbing into the trunk from inside your car.
As personal injury attorneys, we always hope that you never have to deal with an injury or wrongful death to your child. We know that prevention is the first step to ensuring your child’s safety. Hopefully, by following these steps, you can stop children’s injuries from occuring needlessly.
Here is the rest of our six-part series on Avoiding Children’s Injuries:
- Avoiding Children’s Injuries Part 1 – Backover Car Accidents
- Avoiding Children’s Injuries Part 2 – Summer Heat
- Avoiding Children’s Injuries Part 3 – Power Windows
- Avoiding Children’s Injuries Part 4 – Rollaway Auto Accidents
- Avoiding Children’s Injuries Part 5 – Seat Belt Entanglement
Please feel free to call us now at 1-858-551-2090 or click here for a FREE CONSULTATION with an experienced personal injury attorney. We have a large bilingual staff that can assist you in either English or Spanish.

SENIOR PERSONAL INJURY ATTORNEY & FIRM FOUNDER
Michael Pines is a former insurance company attorney who graduated from the University of California Hastings College of the Law in 1987. While he was an insurance attorney, he learned from behind the scenes how insurance companies work and how they decide how much to pay injured people. Now that he works against insurance companies, Michael’s inside knowledge has resulted in significant benefits to his clients injured in car accidents. Learn more about Michael Pines