Jessica Cherie Bowden

Jessica Cherie Bowden
April 25, 1985
March 7, 1988

Daughter's Death Sends
Cherie Bowden on
Toy Safety Crusade

By Mary Johnson Loftus
The Ledger-Lakeland, Florida

The first thing Cherie Bowden saw as she entered her Lakeland home was her 2½ year-old-daughter, Jessica, dangling from the baby swing in the living room doorway. The blond toddler was twisted in the swing's canvas ropes. Her feet were touching the ground, but she was strangely quiet and motionless. Cherie dropped her purse and keys, and rushed to untangle her daughter

"Poor thing, she got stuck and is just taking a nap until somebody gets her down," Cherie told herself, knowing this wasn't so. When Cherie touched her daughter's arm, it was cold. She fought to still the panic that threatened to overwhelm her, trying to remember what to do. "They can bring her back; they have modern medicine, " she thought, frantically pulling at the swing's straps, which were wrapped tightly around her daughter's neck.

The morning of March 7, 1988, started calmly at the Bowden home. Cherie and her children---5-year-old Carl, Jessica and their infant brother, Whitney---got up at about 8 a.m. Usually they slept in on Mondays, but Cherie's husband, Doug, was working the midnight shift, so they got up when he came home. For lunch, the family ate hot dogs and macaroni and cheese, Jessica's favorite.

The younger children started to get sleepy, so Cherie put 4-month-old Whitney in his crib, and tucked Jessica in with Doug for an afternoon nap. "Do you think I could run to Sears and pick up our pictures ?" Cherie asked Doug, eager to see the children's portraits taken the month before. "Wait until everyone's asleep," he answered. When the house grew quiet, a little after 1 p.m., Cherie and Carl left.

Cherie's screams woke Doug. When he entered the living room, she was still trying to untangle Jessica. "He grabbed her from me, and started doing CPR," Cherie says. "I ran to the kitchen to dial 911. They wouldn't let me get off the phone, so I kept yelling in to Doug, 'Is she breathing?' and he would say, 'No.' " The ambulance arrived, and paramedics swept Jessica away from her frantic parents and rushed her to Lakeland Regional Medical Center.

She was pronounced dead at 5:01 p.m. "The doctor later told us it took about five minutes," Cherie says. "The medical examiner said she passed out first. It was good to know she didn't suffer." Cherie remembers her last glimpse of Jessica's face. "There were no tears in her eyes, or tear stains on her face," she says. "She looked like she was sleeping, like an angel." Cherie thought it was important for Carl to go to his sister's funeral.

"I didn't want him to think that ambulances take kids to never-never land," she said. Carl tried to reassure his parents. He would tell them, "Jessica's just playing a joke," or "I love Jessie. She can come home now." "That tore me up," Bowden says. "The spirit and body are hard for me to understand, let alone explain to a 5-year-old." Cherie and Doug struggled with their grief. "We felt like failures," she says. "Doug thought daddies were supposed to be there to ward off all evil.

People would ask me, 'Weren't you watching her?' you can't watch them 24 hours a day. You have to sleep, to go to the bathroom. I always thought that if something happened to one of my kids, it would be time for the people in the white coats to come take me away. But then you're there, and it has happened, and you're handling it." Sgt. Roger Boatner of the Lakeland Police Department reported Jessica's death as an accident.

The police said it appeared that Jessica woke up from her nap, wandered into the living room, and started playing with her brother's Johnny Jump-up baby swing. "The cord of the chair became wrapped around the girl's neck and she strangled, " the police report read. "I don't know how it happened because I wasn't there, " Cherie says. "I could think about it for the rest of my life." And, for a time, Cherie couldn't get past her loss.

She missed holding and hugging her daughter, going into the girls' department in stores and picking out pink lace dresses. She was angry that Whitney would never know his older sister. "I was really upset that Jessica was going to miss her first day of school," Cherie says. Cherie collected all of Jessica's pictures in a white lace-covered photo album. She even asked friends and relatives for their snapshots.

"I wanted to have all of her stuff in one place, " Cherie says. The book is inscribed "Jessica Cherie Bowden, April 25, 1985, March 7, 1988." It begins with pictures of Jessica as a dark-haired infant propped against her brother's leg, and surrounded by presents on her first Christmas. Then Jessica grows into a light-haired toddler, playing dress-up in her mom's high heels, and splashing around in a wading pool in a blue and pink swimsuit.

The last pages show Jessica in her small white coffin, blond hair spread across the pillow. There is a picture of a tree by the cemetery where she is buried. The caption beneath it reads "Jessica's tree." "The tree was planted three weeks before she died, " Cherie says. "We plan to take a picture of it every year. The tree will start growing where Jessica stopped, physically."
Jessica's grave marker.
Doug will be buried on one side, and I am on the other.
Sometimes she would crawl in bed with us and this is how it would be.

During a visit to the cemetery, Cherie noticed all of the tiny graves. "When a child dies, you feel like somebody's at fault," she says. "Jessica's death was so needless, the way she died. I thought, maybe I can prevent this from happening to someone else. you can't prevent cancer, or something like that, but toys that are unsafe....." Cherie checked into the Johnny Jump-Up, which she had bought at a garage sale.

"I thought maybe it had been banned or recalled and I just hadn't heard about it", she says. She did some research at the library, and found children's lawn furniture that had been banned because it pinched fingers, but no ban on the Johnny Jump-Up Baby Exerciser. She found, in fact, that it was still on sale, brightly packaged, on the shelves of local discount department stores.

"It didn't make sense to me, " Cherie said. "Aspirin were pulled off the shelves because they were tampered with and killed one person. I read an article where Listerine was pulled in one state because it tasted funny. But these toys that have choked children to death....are still for sale. "I want to tell what happened to Jessica. I don't want someone coming up to me later and saying, 'My child just got killed; why didn't you say anything?' "

Everyday since Jessica died, Cherie has completed at least one task toward keeping other children safe. She has written letters to other parents who have lost young children and to the editorial sections of new papers, and she has talked at her church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Lakeland. She contacted The Consumer Product Safety Commission in Washington, D.C., to find out if any other children had been killed on the Johnny Jump-Up (they didn't know), and to report Jessica's death.

She called David Snow, a child-safety advocate in California whose 7-year-old daughter was killed by a lawn dart, and told him she would like to join his "crusade" against unsafe toys." And she contacted Edward Swartz, a Boston attorney, after reading his book "Toys that Don't Care" He sent her an updated version, "Toys that Kill", published in 1986. Cherie has had some victories--the Johnny Jump-Up Baby Exerciser, manufactured by Evenflo Juvenile Furniture Co., was included on Swartz's 1988 list of the "10 Worst Toys" in the country.

But Cherie, and the advocacy groups she joined forces with, have also encountered resistance. The Johnny Jump-Up Baby Exerciser is still being manufactured, says Evenflo Juvenile Furniture Co. attorney Bob potter of Tampa. "My understanding is that this child became entangled in the straps when not inside the swing, after it was left hanging," Potter says. "This is the same sort of hazard many household products exhibit, such as curtain strings or venetian blinds."

Evenflo reviewed the comments about the Johnny Jump-Up on Swartz's list, and took "appropriate action, " Potter says, but he could not say if any changes were planned in the design or warnings included with the exerciser. Cherie wants the Johnny Jump-Up off store shelves, and has lawyers who are investigating the case. Her goal, she says, is to see the government take immediate action to ban and recall toys that kill or severely injure children. "Toys should be kids' friends; they shouldn't kill them," she says. It has been 14 months since Jessica's death. "I thought one year would be the magical date, when it would hurt less, because people were always saying, 'Gosh, it hasn't even been a year yet,'" Cherie says. "But there is no date like that." Cherie, eight months pregnant, sits on her front porch watching 1½ year-old Whitney toddle between the furniture. "We always wanted a large family," Cherie says, hands resting on her stomach. "I'm kind of hoping for a girl."