The day after Christmas 2016, Jenesee Beaudoin was moving her SUV in her parents’ San Antonio driveway, preparing to pack up her children’s presents, when she felt something under her wheels.
“It felt like I went off a curb,” she said. As she opened the car door to see what happened, her son began screaming his younger sister’s name from the doorway. “I ran to the back of my car and there she was in between my back tires.”
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Beaudoin had left Briley, 2, in a living room full of adults. But once in the driver’s seat, she had no way to see that her daughter had wandered outside after her — right into the SUV’s front blind zone as she started the engine.
Briley died hours later at a hospital.
“I had a backup camera, but I wasn’t going backwards,” Beaudoin said. “It took seconds. It’s literally seconds and someone’s life is changed forever.”
Briley was one of an estimated 64 children who died that year after being hit by a forward-moving vehicle off of public roads, according to an NBC News analysis of federal crash data. More than twice as many children have died from such crashes when vehicles were moving forward than backward in recent years. An estimated 744 children were killed that way from 2016 to 2020, mostly in driveways and parking lots. In the majority of deaths, the child was hit by an SUV or a pickup truck.
Those numbers rose sharply in 2020, and advocates worry they will continue to rise, as Americans increasingly buy large vehicles with big front blind zones, instead of smaller cars with greater visibility.
Front cameras could help prevent these deaths, safety experts say. New vehicles sold in the United States are required to have a backup camera for rear visibility, but no such regulation exists for front blind zones. While some vehicles do come standard now with front cameras, or with front sensors that can detect obstacles and may prevent accidents, they are often expensive or luxury vehicles.
But front blind zones can extend a dozen feet or more for some of the country’s most popular vehicles, according to Consumer Reports, much further than drivers may realize. In a demonstration at the Consumer Reports Test Track in Connecticut, NBC News found it took at least nine elementary school children sitting in a line for someone in the driver’s seat of four different SUVs and pickup trucks to see the top of a single child’s head.
For the full report, go to NBCNews.com’s for the story and the video report.