New mom Rachel Jungling and husband Ryne Jungling are warning parents after their “miracle” baby Anders died in his car seat in January. Anders was left napping in his car seat for two hours before he was discovered. Anders and his sister Linnea were 11 months old at the time, and were born after the Junglings struggled with infertility for seven years.
On Jan. 10, 2019, Jungling dropped off Anders and Linnea off at dare care when the two were still strapped in their car seats. Linnea was wide awake, but Anders was nodding off.
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“With two, Rachel didn’t feel comfort leaving one in the car, so she would grab them both in the carriers and bring them in,” Ryne told Good Morning America on Oct. 17. “It was common practice. Every day, we’d give the day care provider the update — how they slept the night before, what they ate. [The kids] were usually out of the car seat.”
Ryne said the day care provider took Linnea from her car seast, but left Anders in the car seat when Jungling left.
“Anders looked over at Rachel and Rachel said, ‘Bye buddy,’” Ryne explained. “He kind of smiled, and she left — with the assumption that he was going to be taken out of his car seat, and he wasn’t.”
A few minutes after 10 a.m. that day, Ryne got a call from police, who said they had to pick her up and Anders wastaken to the hospital. Ryne then called his wife.
“She said, something happened to Anders and you need to get to the hospital and I think it’s really bad,’” Ryne recalled. “I remember her voice, I never heard it like that. She was really worried, it was tough. She thought it was kind of weird, but she knew it was pretty serious, if something like that was happening.”
When Ryne finally got to the hospital, two detectives told him Anders was sleeping in his car seat for two hours at day care. The day care provider was unaware of the risks of leaving a baby sleeping in a car seat, Ryne said.
The day care provider tried to rvie Anders with CPR, and paramedicts worked on him for 40 minutes. After a half hour in a nearby hospital’s emergency room, he was airlifted from Bismark to a Fargo hospital.
“To actually realize what was happening with our son, that was hard,” Ryne explained to GMA. “We prayed a lot that he would get better, that this would all go away. We were praying for a miracle to happen. At the same time, we started to pray that this story would lead to a miracle. Maybe Anders surviving, maybe that wasn’t the miracle. Maybe it was preventing this [from happening] to someone else.”
Anders died after three days on life support. Investigators said he died from positional asphyxia. His airway was cut off from his head after it slumped over and his chin fell on his chest.
Ryne agreed that this was “a parent’s worst nighmare,” adding, “You feel helpless when you can’t do anything for your child. It’s hard to say … but we really think lots of good has come out of this.”
After Anders’ death, the Junglings met with Carma Hanson of the Grand Forks, North Dakota chapter of SafeKids Worldwide. They agreed they needed to share their story at the 2019 Safe Kids Worldwide Childhood Injury Prevention Convention in July.
“We know it’s not the car seat’s fault, it’s an education issue,” Ryne told GMA. “The old adage of ‘Don’t wake a sleeping baby’ is so wrong when it’s not safe sleep.”
On Oct. 2, the Junglings welcomed another son, Elias. They now hope car seat manufacturers will place a warning right on the seats to remind people not to leave sleeping infants in them.
In 2017, the CDC reported there were 3,600 sudden unexpected infant deaths (SUID), including 1,400 deaths due to sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). The American Academy of Pediatrics’ safe sleeping guidelines can be found by clicking here.
Photo credit: Dayna Smith/for the Washington Post/Getty Images
