Four-month-old Dakota Jack Kunz was killed instantly when he was ejected from his car seat, thrown thorough a rear window and hit a telephone pole in a 1995 traffic accident in Ogden.
Now the child's family has filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the manufacturer and retailer of the child safety restraint device, claiming both companies misrepresented the device's safety features.Mother Candice L. Kunz and grandmother Lois L. Kunz, of Weber County, are suing Ohio-based Evenflo Companies Inc. and Wal-Mart Inc. of Arkansas in connection with Dakota's death.
The lawsuit, filed Monday, seeks general and punitive damages to be determined at trial, special damages related to medical and burial expenses and attorney's fees.
The infant was ejected from his Evenflo "Joyride" car seat in December 1995 when the vehicle he was riding in collided with a truck at the intersection of Lincoln Street and 2000 South in Ogden.
The lawsuit claims the child was properly buckled in the safety seat, which was fastened with a seat belt at the time of the accident.
"(Plaintiffs) were deceived into a belief that the car seat was safe, when in fact the likelihood of death or serious bodily injury was high," the lawsuit says.
"In spite of this knowledge, defendants willfully and unconscionably misrepresented the car seat to be safe and continued to sell the safety seat pursuant to those misrepresentations."
The Kunzes contend the seat was defective and that Evenflo fostered a false sense of security in misrepresenting the car seat, including its fitness to appropriately restrain infants in auto collisions.
Wal-Mart employees should have known representations of the product were materially false and been aware of Consumers Digest articles depicting the product's inadequacies, the lawsuit says.
The complaint alleges breach of warranty in that Evenflo guaranteed the seat free of defects for a certain amount of time and that Wal-Mart extended implied warranties of fitness through its sale. It also accuses the companies of negligence in design and providing warning labels and literature.
Evenflo has been recalling Joyride and similar seats since the Kunzes' accident, the lawsuit says.
Attempts to get comments from Wal-Mart and Evenflo at their corporate headquarters were unsuccessful Tuesday.