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Avoidable Tragedy
When Mary Ellsworth awoke one morning, she noticed her son Bobby's double-cab Toyota was still in the driveway. He must have slept over at a friend's house, she thought. Mary and her husband, Bob, had always urged Bobby to stay put when he was tired and out late. "Thank God he didn't drive," she told herself.It was July 2003, a mere month after two milestones: Bobby's 18th birthday and his high school graduation. Mary was pleased that her outdoors-loving son was having a near-perfect summer, fishing and working as a groundskeeper at a golf course.
Her joy ended, though, when she answered the phone at 8 a.m. It was the San Diego medical examiner; Bobby was in the county morgue.
The Ellsworths learned that Bobby and 18-year-old Waylon Blocker had been visiting friends outside San Diego. Bobby was riding shotgun in Blocker's pickup truck. At 1:50 a.m., they headed home to Jamul, California, on a two-lane rural road. Blocker crossed the center line and slammed head-on into a BMW with a driver and three passengers inside. Everyone sustained serious injuries; only Bobby's were fatal.
But it was one shocking discovery that "really put the knife in our hearts, "says Bob Ellsworth. "The state police told us no airbags deployed in the truck because there were no airbags. Instead the compartments were stuffed with paper. Everyone on the scene -- the police, EMTs, firefighters -- couldn't believe what they were seeing."
Bobby Ellsworth was the victim of airbag fraud. In many cases, crooked body shops looking to make a quick buck replace a deployed airbag with a used one or the wrong type. Or, as in the Ellsworth case, the compartment is filled with junk, literally, then resealed. And tragically, even though Bobby wasn't wearing a seat belt, had there been an airbag in that truck, "it would have saved his life, "says Kenneth Alvin Solomon, PhD, a forensic scientist with the Institute of Risk and Safety Analysis.
Although there aren't reliable statistics on how often this deadly scam occurs, "it's bad and it's getting worse," says Aaron Cobb of the Special Investigations Unit for Farmers Insurance. Consider these tragic cases:
In 2003 a driver was seriously injured, and her mother, who was in the front passenger seat, died in a head-on collision. The car was a salvaged vehicle that had been rebuilt, but the driver had no way of knowing that someone had removed the driver-side airbag. What's more, the passenger-side airbag was inoperative -- it had deployed in a previous accident and simply been jammed back in the compartment.
Det. Tom Burke of the NYPD Auto Crimes Division remembers a grim investigation in 2005 involving five teens on the Throgs Neck Expressway in New York City whose used car veered off the road and hit a tree. Two died. The owner didn't know the vehicle had been in an accident that caused the airbags to deploy. "Whoever fixed the car bought the airbags off the Internet and didn't install them correctly, "Burke says. "If the job had been done right, these kids wouldn't have died. People believe replacing an airbag is like replacing any other part in a car."
It's not. An airbag is designed for a particular make, model, year and location in the car. After a bag has deployed, it should be replaced with a new one and connected to the designated onboard computer by an expert.
"Getting the right airbag placed properly into a car is almost like neurosurgery," cautions James Quiggle of the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud. That's why the Automotive Occupant Restraint Council (AORC) recommends using only the original car manufacturer's replacement parts. Yet if you go on the Internet, you'll find several thousand airbags for sale; on eBay, there are starting bids as low as 99 cents.
Cons for Cash
"Every alarm bell says airbag fraud is widespread, persistent and deadly,"says Quiggle. You're vulnerable to these swindles whenever you buy a used vehicle or send a wrecked one for repairs. After a con artist makes the switch, he pockets the insurance payment intended for the purchase of new airbags. Brand-new, a single bag can cost $1,000 or more. One job, in which the two main front airbags deploy, could net a crook several thousand dollars.
It's not impossible for these used airbags to work, according to the AORC, but there are significant concerns: "Airbags may have been exposed to conditions, such as excessive heat or floodwaters [electrical and safety systems could be compromised], that can result in unacceptable performance. There is currently no test to verify that such exposure has not occurred and that the airbags will perform acceptably."
New vehicles must meet federal safety standards, but previously owned vehicles aren't subject to similar scrutiny. "Except in a few states, there's no law requiring that deployed airbags be replaced, other than your garden-variety fraud statute," says Rosemary Shahan, founder of Consumers for Auto Reliability and Safety (CARS).
Remember Bobby Ellsworth's friend Waylon Blocker? His parents asked an acquaintance, Arnold Parra, to get a truck for their son at a salvage auction. The truck had been in a previous front-end collision in which the airbags had deployed, according to the Ellsworths' lawyer, Julia Haus. She contends in a suit against Parra that he would have known that because he rebuilt the wrecked truck. Parra is currently facing multiple lawsuits in this case; he's been charged with wrongful death and gross negligence. Parra's lawyer, Robert Bonito, says his client is not culpable, that he didn't know the airbags had deployed. "The vehicle came with the airbag compartments sealed," he says. "No one knows how they got stuffed with paper."
Missing Facts
Consumers currently have no way of knowing the full history of a used car. Before buying, many turn to services such as Carfax and AutoCheck, which report whether the vehicle was in an accident or flood or was stolen, or if the airbags ever deployed. Consumer advocates, however, warn that those databases don't always receive the most up-to-date information. One reason: Insurance companies and some DMVs won't share damage claims data with the history services.
Lisa Thompson discovered how costly a reporting delay can be. In April 2006 she and her 19-year-old son, Chris, found a car on craigslist. The seller told Chris another potential buyer's mechanic had inspected the car. Chris test-drove it and ran a Carfax report. "Everything checked out great," says Thompson.
The car broke down the day after they bought it. Their mechanic told them it was a rebuilt wreck that would require $4,000 worth of repairs. So what went wrong? Chris took the seller at his word, and Carfax hadn't yet received documentation that the car had been totaled in a previous accident.
The issues, Thompson learned, weren't just mechanical: "The driver's airbag was a salvaged one that the guy had slapped in there, but he never replaced the system's computer, so the airbag wasn't functional. "To cover his deceit, the seller removed the dashboard warning light that would have signaled something was amiss.
The seller was slick but was no match for Thompson, a crime analyst for the Concord, California, Police Department. It took eight months for her to track down the original owner who'd sold the car as salvage after wrecking it. He provided information and photos that helped Thompson win a judgment against the crook who rebuilt and sold her the car.
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