Consumer 10.0: A toddler's legacy: Grief and a movement for better crib safety

No one saw Danny Keysar die on that beautiful spring day in Chicago 12 years ago. But it was painfully easy to tell what happened.

At 16 months, Danny was a cheery little boy. He never tired of "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star," preferred chewing on crayons to coloring with them, and loved to play peek-a-boo and bark back at dogs.

After lunch, Danny went to bed in the nap room of his day-care center. Apparently he climbed to his feet after waking - normal toddler behavior but risky to Danny in ways no one imagined.

All investigators could say for sure was that Danny choked to death in the collapsing side rail of a Playskool Travel-Lite portable crib. The flimsy lock in the middle of the hinged rail hadn't held. His own weight, all 25 pounds of it, was enough to strangle him in the V-shaped rail, tightening around his neck like an animal trap.

Twelve years later, the wounds suffered that day remain raw enough to bring tears to his mother, Linda Ginzel. That's how it is for a bereaved parent.

But it's not just Danny's horrific death that keeps the pain near the surface for Ginzel and her husband, Boaz Keysar, both professors at the University of Chicago.

It's also what they learned in the months and years ahead as they investigated Danny's death and decided to sue its manufacturer, Kolcraft, and the owner of the crib's Playskool brand, Hasbro.

Their first disturbing discovery was that Danny had died in a portable crib that had been recalled five years earlier, and after three similar deaths.

The mother who had bought the Playskool crib, and who had donated it to Sweet Tots, still had a daughter at the center. But neither she nor the day care's owner had heard about the recall, and no system existed for warning even the original purchaser.

By 2001, six children had died in the Travel-Lite - a rate topping 1 death per 2,000 cribs made and sold between 1990 and 1992. All told, 17 children have died in portable cribs of similar design.

Then there was the discovery that the Playskool and its "play yard" cousins hadn't been covered by any safety or testing standards - not mandatory rules or even the industry's favored alternative, "voluntary standards."

Finally, there was this: Keysar and Ginzel didn't want Danny's death to be in vain, so they refused to turn inward. Instead, they decided to push for change to help keep other children safe.