A grieving mother shared a heartbreaking message to warn other parents after her 17-month-old baby girl passed away while sleeping in a separate room.
Keri Hall Volmert created ‘Remembering Sammie Joyce Volmert’ Facebook page to help raise awareness of the dangers of sleeping on a different room or floor from your babies.
In a heart-wrenching post, she detailed what happened to her ‘precious baby’ and urged others to share the post so that other parents could learn from their story.
“I changed my precious baby into her tiny nightgown, wiped her snotty little nose, walked through the living room with her in my arms as she proudly said “night night” to her Daddy and big brother,” Keri wrote on Facebook.
“I carried her up the stairs and placed her down in her beautiful crib that was made for a princess. She cried a little bit, and I walked out of the room knowing she would be asleep within two minutes as she always was.
“I never would have imagined that would be the last time I would see her alive.”
Keri said that the screeching panic and desperation in her husband’s voice the next day was something she would never forget.
“I was in the kitchen making coffee and as soon as he screamed “Keri” I knew something was terribly wrong,” she went on.
She froze and her husband yelled her name again while running down the stairs carrying their daughter who had been so energetic and full of life hours ago. He said: “I think Sammie is dead.”
They rushed her to the emergency room where she was pronounced dead.
“Even though our upstairs thermostat was set on 72 degrees, the heater was blasting upstairs and it felt like a sauna. The temperature registered 99 degrees on our thermostat which was as high as it could go (meaning it was over 100 degrees),” she went on.
“Sammie died of hyperthermia. Doctors believe she never woke up or made a sound since children (until age 3 to 5) cannot regulate their own body temperature as older children and adults are able to do.”
Keri said she knew pillows, stuffed pillows and blankets could be dangerous to babies and that both of her children slept in sleep sacks until they were 1.
“I wish I had once read about this,” she expressed. “There is a cheap temperature monitor I could have had-would have had If I had heard of even one instance where a child could die by a heater not turning off like it is supposed to.”
Keri wants other parents to hear Sammie’s story so that other families can be spared from the devastating grief they were forced to endure.
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