Beth Woodruff later learned that the man who caused the crash was a four-time drunken driver, and that something might have gone wrong with her son's seat belt, leaving him vulnerable during a catastrophic crash.
"It was such an everyday thing," Beth Woodruff recalled. "You buy the thing, you put the thing in the car."
Although Ford’s policy dictates dealerships give extenders for free to the few customers who need them, Martin testified in a deposition he never received any instruction about the distribution of seat belt extenders or the dangers of their misuse. Whenever a customer would come into the dealership and ask for one, Martin said, the dealership would sell it to them, “no questions asked.”
"Just because a random tongue clicks into a buckle doesn't mean that that's a full-strength latch," Roger Burnett, a Ford engineer, would later testify in a deposition in Woodruff's lawsuit. Ford responded by issuing a memo to all dealerships reminding them of the policy that extenders should be ordered only for customers who need them and never sold. Ford also tasked an employee with investigating online sellers, but that effort seemed to fade when the employee left the company, according to the motion.
"Proving its only concern was monetary, all of the steps Ford took at this time centered around preventing others from profiting off Ford's customer giveaway program — not preventing children from getting injured or killed," Woodruff's attorneys, Dan Stanley and Richard Collins, wrote.
Ben almost made it home. He was waiting to turn from East Gov. John Sevier Highway into his subdivision on Austin Lane, his kids sitting in the back seat, when an SUV barreled across the center line at 65 mph and slammed head-on into his stopped car. His Juke spun into the path of an oncoming minivan, which crashed into the driver's side and sent the car skidding to a stop in the middle of the road.
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