As they lay trapped in the dark boot of their car, all Janette and Greig Fennell could think about was the safety of their nine-month-old son.
Moments earlier, the couple had been forced into their vehicle at gunpoint by masked thugs.
But even more terrifying for the couple was the fact that their baby was in the back seat at the time.
Speaking to DailyMail.com about the harrowing night in 1995, she recalled: “They got in the car and all we heard them say was: there’s a baby.”
But try as they might, the couple were unable to free themselves and so began a terrifying experience that saw them spend hours thinking their son Alex had been kidnapped or murdered.
Janette and Greig Fennell were robbed at gunpoint and forced into the boot of their car with their son Alex still strapped in the back seat in 1995. Pictured: The family a few years after the incident.
The nightmare unfolded as the Fennells were returning home after dinner at a friend’s house.
They pulled into their garage as usual, but before the door could close, a group of men wearing Halloween masks and gloves invaded their white Lexus.
They forced the couple into the trunk and sped off into the night.
“While that was happening, I said to my husband, ‘Can you hear the baby? Can you hear the baby?'” Janette told DailyMail.com. “And then, you know, your mind does crazy things.
“I said, ‘Oh, I just saw an Oprah show that says if you don’t get out in the first five minutes, you’re dead. ‘ And we were talking about crazy stuff like that and we started praying. And I kept saying, ‘Can you hear it? Can you hear it? ‘”
With their thoughts racing and time running out, they began to desperately try to get out of there, but it was in vain.
“Nothing makes sense at that point except, you know, you want to survive and you want to figure out how to keep the baby safe, I mean, at nine months they can never be alone,” she added.
They were eventually driven to a secluded location south of San Francisco, where the masked men opened the trunk once again.
“I stood up because I wanted to try and get an idea of where they had taken us and that’s when they hit me with the butt of the gun on the back of the head and pushed me down,” Janette said.
The kidnappers took them to a remote location, assaulted them, robbed them and left them for dead. Miraculously, they managed to find a latch to open the trunk and escape.
They were forced to hand over their jewellery, valuables and postal codes under threat of death if they lied.
“They go to my husband and use the gun to separate his necklace, to make sure he is not wearing the necklace they want. I mean, he could have left at that moment,” she added.
‘They took everything and the last thing they said to us before closing the trunk was: “If this is not the correct PIN number, we will come back and kill you.”
With that, they slammed the trunk shut and sped off in a waiting vehicle, leaving the couple for dead.
But in a moment that Janette calls ‘divine intervention’, she saw a light shining on a device, which turned out to be The internal release mechanism of the trunk.
The couple managed to escape and called 911 for police assistance.
Miraculously, Alex was found safe and sound shortly afterwards. The kidnappers had deposited him unharmed in the foyer of the family home.
But in the weeks and years that followed that fateful night, Janette struggled to adjust and was haunted by the words of one officer who told her that situations like hers typically don’t end the way they did.
While the kidnappers remained at large, she was plagued by thoughts that something similar could happen to someone else.
The intruders took baby Alex, then nine months old, and left him on his parents’ porch before speeding off.
“I thought this was crazy. How could someone get into their own trunk and not be able to get out?” he said.
Fuelled by her anger, Fennell wrote to car manufacturers demanding to know why vehicles do not come with emergency latch releases as standard.
Getting no response, he took his campaign a step further by compiling the first set of data on the number of accidents involving people locked in trunks.
But in a pre-Google world, this meant sifting through pages of newspaper clippings and court transcripts.
“I would type in ‘log’ and ‘locked’ and get 10,000 hits,” he explained. “Then I would spend hours reading each of the results.”
Their efforts revealed some alarming statistics: 931 incidents involving 1,082 people.
In a quarter of cases the victim died from heatstroke, asphyxiation or hypothermia.
The victims were usually children who had entered the water while playing or people who had been kidnapped.
After the ordeal, Jannette dedicated her life to campaigning for the devices to be fitted in all cars. Pictured: the Fennells today, including their son Alex (second from right), who was just a baby at the time of the crime.
Fennell began collecting her own data on trunk-trapping and managed to convince a Michigan representative to help her campaign.
For the next four years, Fennell fought to make her voice heard, and in the process discovered she wasn’t the first to call for change.
Each time, vehicle manufacturers stubbornly resisted implementing the change, citing prohibitive costs.
However, the tenacious mother discovered a model from the 1970s that showed the devices would cost just 3 cents per car to manufacture and install.
His fortunes improved after a meeting with then-U.S. Representative Bart Stupak, who took an interest in the case.
He sponsored a bill to require a study of trunk entrapment, and the Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration formed a panel to investigate.
Despite some initial reluctance, the panel approved a mandate in 1999 by a single vote.
The mandate stipulates that all vehicles from the year 2002 onwards must be equipped with a trunk latch release mechanism.
Their Work The Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration passed a mandate requiring that all trunks on 2002 and newer model-year cars be equipped with emergency release latches.
Since then there has been no evidence of any deaths related to the trunk with the device installed.
Not content with her victory, however, Fennell continued to campaign for greater car safety and formed the nonprofit Kids and Car Safety.
Today it is recognized as a national leader in child vehicle safety and can take credit for innovations such as safer window controls and brake interlock systems and changes to automatic key cards.
“I think part of the message should be that we all suffer from the feeling of ‘it’s not going to happen to me,'” Janette explained. “But nothing could be further from the truth.”
(tags to translate)dailymail
