Brooke Katz died three months pregnant.
A hit-and-run motorist slammed into the front of the 2005 Dodge Caravan that Katz, 27, was driving, spinning it 180 degrees.
“It’s one that sticks with me,” Atlanta Police Officer Shane Keller said recently.
After the crash, police saw something “curious,” as the officer put it. The Caravan’s air bags had not deployed.
It’s a fatal mystery repeated in hundreds of traffic accidents, an investigation by The Kansas City Star found: front air bags that did not inflate in deadly front-end crashes.
Analyzing a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration database of all traffic fatalities over a six-year period, the newspaper discovered that far more people had died from wrecks where air bags didn’t deploy than all of those who died from injuries caused by air bags that fired too easily or too forcefully.
A decade ago, deaths blamed on overly aggressive air bags triggered congressional action, which brought about the so-called smart bags of today. About 300 people have died from improper air bag deployments since 1990.
But the paper found those deaths are dwarfed by another body count just as disturbing. At least 1,400 drivers and front-seat passengers died from 2001 through 2006 in front-impact crashes involving vehicles whose air bags — smart or otherwise — never deployed.
“I have to say I’m shocked,” said Joan Claybrook, former chief of NHTSA and current president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen.
Even when air bags work, people still die in serious accidents. In the six-year span analyzed by The Star, head-on crashes killed about 14,000 drivers and front-seat passengers, even though their air bags deployed.
But in that same period, the federal government has estimated that air bags saved 15,000 lives.
Nobody knows how many more lives could have been saved if the air bags had deployed in the cases reviewed by The Star. And because of insufficient data gathered by NHTSA, speeds for many of those wrecks are unknown, raising questions as to whether those vehicles were going fast enough to activate the air bags.
For those reasons and others, NHTSA officials disputed The Star’s findings and don’t consider uninflated air bags to be a significant problem. The NHTSA declined to make top officials available for interviews
In a statement, the agency warned that “The Kansas City Star is doing a grave disservice to its readers, by implying — through an improper analysis of our own data — that air bags are not performing as intended.”
Rae Tyson, a spokesman for NHTSA, also noted that air bags are considered supplemental safety devices. They are thought to save one-sixth the number of lives that fastened seat belts save.
If you’re not belted, “the air bag is meaningless,” Tyson said. “I am dismissing half of your [1,400 fatality] number anyway because the occupants were not belted and, as far as I’m concerned, bets are off.”
The Star found that non-deployments represented nearly one-fourth of the thousands of complaints lodged with the NHTSA over severe accidents.
“How many people buy cars based on those five-star crash ratings they see advertised on TV, expecting them to perform the way they’re supposed to?” said Gregg Katz, Brooke’s husband. “And when they fail … how do you say to a 3-year-old that her mother is gone?”
In her princess-style bedroom, daughter Addisyn, now 6, points to snapshots of Brooke Katz and passively tells visitors, “Mommy died.”
