In Montreal, Carol Smith still suffers from nightmares about a terrifying ordeal she experienced last December.
“It is still with me, I cannot get it out of my mind,” the 93-year-old said.
Smith was sleeping in her daughter’s guest room for the Christmas holidays. Her daughter, Caroline Hanrahan, had purchased a motorized bed for her spare room a few years before. She would not let her mother operate the bed, for fear she would have trouble with the remote control. Hanrahan would open the bed at night for her mother.
But in the early hours of the morning just before Christmas, Smith awoke to the whirring sounds of the bed’s motor. She quickly realized the bed was slowly closing, trapping her inside. The remote control was on a side table across the room and she could not reach it.
“I can still hear that sound, and I do not know if I will ever get that out of my head,” Smith said. “I could feel the bed starting to crunch my body as it was going up and there was nothing I could do about it, and that is the most horrible feeling in the world.”
Smith says she started screaming, but her cries were muffled by blankets and the sounds of the motor.
Luckily, her son-in-law John Hanrahan woke his wife to check on her mother.
When Caroline entered the room, she initially thought her mother had gotten up and closed the bed herself; she looked for her in the bathroom. Then, she noticed the bed was jutting out slightly from the wall, and her heart sank when she realized her mother was still inside the bed, trapped against the wall.
She screamed for John who came running to help. The couple grabbed the remote and tried to open the bed, but it wouldn’t budge. John used all his strength to physically force the bed open, pulling on a metal bar to bring the platform down to the ground.
“I started pulling on it and it did not come down at first,” John said. “I started pushing on it and it suddenly gave way and landed on top of me and I was under the bed. It was really scary that I could not get it to open.”
They found Smith curled up in the fetal position close to the wall, limp, lifeless and very grey.
“I was crying and just saying ‘Don’t leave me, don’t leave me.’ Yeah, it was pretty scary,” Caroline said.
Smith had fluid in her mouth and wasn’t breathing, so they started performing CPR. They managed to get a pulse back, and soon enough emergency first responders arrived.
Smith’s daughter Caroline had purposefully placed the remote control for the bed on the other side of the room. She said she took responsibility for opening and closing it each day, as it was complicated for her mother to operate. Caroline says there is no way her mother could have closed the bed herself.
“We just can’t figure out why the remote went off by itself,” she said. “I also don’t understand why the bed did not stop closing when it detected something on it. Obviously, nothing was pressing on the remote so we want to know why it happened.”
Smith spent two weeks in hospital, nursing two broken ribs and an injury to her collar bone. She lost consciousness while in the bed and remembers waking up surrounded by paramedics.
“I told the fireman I thought I was going to die, and he told me ‘Not today,'” she said, laughing.
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Hanrahan says the whole family is so grateful her mother survived the horrific accident, but said it has had lingering effects.
“It has taken its toll. She is definitely not back to the way she was before the accident. She is slower now; she is also scared,” Hanrahan said.
John Hanrahan filed a complaint and a report to Health Canada within a few days of the incident. Although he says no one will ever use the bed and he wants it out of his house, he is leaving it intact, the way it was when first responders entered the room, in case Health Canada inspectors want to look at what happened. He has not heard from anyone since April.
“I was kind of expecting to hear back from Health Canada pretty quickly. They acknowledged receiving the report but then nothing has happened since then from them,” John said. “I got a call back from the local (Health Canada representative) and said they were doing an investigation, they were in contact with the company and they could not discuss what they were talking to them about. It’s all confidential, which is fine, but it leaves us hanging. We don’t know if we should get rid of the bed.”
The family now are on a mission to ensure the same thing doesn’t happen to anybody else.
“We don’t know what to do. Our main concern was just to make sure it did not happen to anybody else,” Caroline Hanrahan said.
The couple has not contacted the company where they purchased the bed, because they are waiting on a Health Canada report.
They bought the bed from Lit Mural in Ville St. Laurent in 2020. Global News spoke with the former owner of the company, Pierre Brunelle, who sold the bed to the couple. He told Global News he doesn’t believe the bed closed on its own, and says it is not possible for that to happen. He also says Lit Mural simply makes the bed frame, and is not responsible for the motorized part of the Murphy bed.
Health Canada did not respond by publication deadline to Global’s request for information on the safety of motorized Murphy beds.
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