Crib donations aim to prevent infant suffocation deaths at Burnsville hotels

Neal Dwyer remembers the call well — in the last year, a young child in Burnsville likely died of asphyxiation after being put down for the night in a regular-sized bed and falling between the bed and a piece of furniture.

"It's not something that I'll ever forget," said Dwyer, assistant chief of emergency medical services for the Burnsville Fire Department. "You feel so much for the family."

That was at someone's home, but traveling families experience the same risk if they don't bring along a crib.

A recent donation by a south metro Lions Club will not only help infants sleep more soundly while families stay at hotels, it could save their lives.

Seven Burnsville hotels received a total of 22 portable cribs this summer, and the Fire Department has eight more on hand. The cribs will be loaned to guests in hopes that the babies sleep in them rather than co-sleeping with their parents, which can be fatal if a parent rolls over on the child.

A child might also suffocate due to their airway being blocked by bedding in a regular-sized bed, Dwyer said, or when a child falls between cushions or a piece of furniture and the wall.

The department started asking how tragic accidents related to young children and sleeping could be prevented and thought portable cribs could make a difference. The Lions Club donated about $3,000 to buy 30 "pack-and-play"-style cribs, Dwyer said.

Michael Goodman, manager at the Best Western Premier Nicollet Inn , said it's not uncommon to have up to a dozen young families staying at the hotel after an emergency like an apartment or townhouse fire or a flood.

Those families might not bring cribs along, he said: "It creates a lot of makeshift situations."

The 131-room hotel, which might have 200 to 250 guests at any time, has had co-sleeping tragedies occur but not in recent years, Goodman said.

The hotel now has 15 cribs on hand. Better to have them and not need them than the reverse, he said.

Burnsville Fire Chief B.J. Jungmann said the city sees some sort of baby or young child tragedy every year or every other year.

The cause of death in those cases was cardiac arrest due to suffocation, he said.

Jungmann was unable to share specifics because of medical privacy laws, but he said that the city saw 15 cardiac arrests in children 5 years old or younger from 2012 through 2021. One was at a hotel, he said.

The crib solution is "very low investment and very high return," Jungmann said.