Atlanta Injury Lawyer Blog
Should your child’s university or college take steps to make sure his or her bunk bed is safe? Either by lowering the upper bed or, if that cannot be done, by providing railings to keep the child from rolling out of the lofted bed? This not a trick question. It may seem like common sense to you. The simple answer should be an easy “yes.” Right? But as Coach Lee Corso says on “College GameDay,” “Not so fast!”
College students’ being injured by falling out of their bunk beds is, apparently, a fairly common and significant problem. You may remember the story of Clark Jacobs, a Georgia Tech student who fell out of his lofted bed in his fraternity house. He fell 7 feet from his bed to the hard floor of his room. He was diagnosed with a fractured skull and a brain bleed which then led to a stroke. Five years later and hundreds of hours of therapy, including in-patient rehabilitation at Shepherd’s Spinal Center, Clark graduated from Georgia Tech this summer.
The life-changing episode motivated Clark’s parents so much to try to make dorm rooms safe for students they started the non-profit Rails Against The Danger, whose mission is to educate the public about the danger of lofted beds in dorm rooms and to let students they have the right to demand the university make the bed safe by lowering it or providing safety bed rails. It is estimated there are approximately 71,000 cases of loft bed/bunk bed-related injuries annually among children and young adults up to 21 years of age. Let that sink in. Some of these falls result in the death of the student. For example, at Miami University in Ohio, a 20 year old student died from a 6 foot fall from his bed in his fraternity. For a risk with potential outcomes so catastrophic, it is truly difficult to understand why universities just don’t simply provide bedrails and ladders with every bunk bed. As Clark Jacobs’s mother points out: “It is ridiculous to take a chance when the danger is so easily avoided. Many campus bunk beds don’t even have ladders, requiring the students to climb up the bed frame to get into bed,” she said.
