Dispatcher couldn't save her baby
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Raedyn Grasseth was the only dispatcher on duty at the Wahkiakum County Sheriff's Office in Cathlamet, Wahkiakum County, at 3:50 a.m. Tuesday when she took a 911 call from the worst possible place - her own home.
Grasseth's 9-month-old daughter, Riley, wasn't breathing, the baby-sitter told her. When the sitter checked on Riley, she found the little girl's head stuck in the side of her fold-up crib.
"We would never have guessed something like this would happen to us," said Grasseth's mother, Cynthia Faubion, a registered nurse and Cathlamet's senior paramedic.
Grasseth dispatched aid crews from Cowlitz and Wahkiakum counties to her home near the county line but couldn't rush to the child herself until she could get someone to replace her at the phones. So Grasseth called her parents. Her father, Bill Faubion, is Cathlamet's assistant fire chief. The baby's aunt, Erin Grasseth, an emergency medical technician who lives nearby, was the first on the scene and started CPR. But they couldn't revive the baby.
Riley died of asphyxiation after her head became stuck in the V-shape created by the collapsible sides of her crib, Wahkiakum County Coroner Fred Johnson said. The Grasseths had borrowed a "Home and Roam" portable crib from another family. Neither knew its manufacturer, Baby Trend Inc. of Pomona, Calif., had recalled the crib in 1995.
A Consumer Product Safety Commission spokesman said Thursday that the agency will investigate the incident.
Emergency workers in Wahkiakum, a county of about 3,900 people, are a tight-knit and sometimes related group. Riley's death, devastating to the family, also leaves the sheriff's office and the Cathlamet Fire Department reeling, Johnson said.
"She was the perfect baby," Cynthia Faubion said Thursday before Riley's funeral. "She was a flirtatious little girl. She smiled at everyone she saw. She had big brown eyes that sparkled."
Faubion said Riley's parents tried to do everything right. The baby's dad, Erik Grasseth, reports to work early at U.S. Gypsum in Rainier, Ore., so the couple often had a baby-sitter stay overnight to care for Riley and her 3-year-old brother, Chase, while their mom worked the graveyard shift at the dispatch center.
The baby-sitter, Riley's great-aunt, awoke to a silent baby monitor, Cynthia Faubion said. She checked on Riley and found her head and shoulders stuck in the collapsed crib. The family, stunned that such a tragedy could happen to a child in the care of so many emergency workers, urges other parents to check federal recall lists for all products their children use.
"We all are geared to check car seats," Cynthia Faubion said. "But when you add high chairs, bouncy seats, playpens - there's so many items - you can't begin to check all the recalls."
Nonetheless, she said parents should try. Portable cribs and playpens manufactured before 1997 can be especially dangerous, said Russ Rader, a spokesman for the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Since the early 1990s, 13 children have died after these cribs folded up on them, Rader said.
Though the commission pulls recalled items off store shelves, those already purchased often remain in circulation, Rader said.
"Parents use cribs and playpens, put them away and forget about them until they have another child, sell it at a garage sale or give it to a relative," Rader said. "It could have been recalled, and they wouldn't know it."
Rader said the Consumer Product Safety Commission uses its Web site, a hot line and alerts to notify people about recalled items.