Camp kids piled in van without enough seat belts

Apologies from the city tonight after KIRO Team 7 Investigators videotape an overloaded van full of children coming back from a summer camp outing.

Fourteen middle school-age students - 9 seatbelts - and a cargo load stuffed with squirming kids. It's a scenario that could have turned deadly with one traffic misstep.

Instead, the Seattle Parks and Recreation Department gets a chance to fix the dangerous problem before any tragedy.

Investigative Reporter Chris Halsne followed the driver of the van to put an end to the transporting of children in a city vehicle without enough seat belts.

This all started as a chance encounter last week. A marked Seattle Parks and Rec vehicle pulled up near the Space Needle and parked right outside KIRO-TV's door. Two news managers, heading up the street to lunch, called Halsne with safety concerns after watching a larger than expected number of children jump out of the back of a van.

When Team 7 Investigators first approached the van, the camp group was gone. We could see three bench seats, fit with three seatbelts each in the back of the city fleet vehicle. It was also easy to videotape the absence of restraints in the cargo floor area.

Within a few hours, a gaggle of 7th and 8th graders, along with two summer camp adult supervisors, came back and started loading up.

There simply wasn't enough room, so four boys packed into the void behind the seats, while a younger girl sat unbelted in the door well.

A Seattle Parks and Recreation sticker adorned the door, so we followed the van. It traveled down the busy, construction-heavy waterfront, then across the West Seattle Bridge to the site of the Hiawatha summer vacation camp, next to West Seattle High School.

Once the city van was safely stopped, Halsne we went to get some answers from the driver.

Halsne:  “It’s unsafe for the kids.  Do you agree?”

Driver:  “Yeah. I do agree with that. I’m sorry.”

Halsne: “How many kids do you have in there?  How many did you have to take care of today?  Seems like a lot, just for you.”

Driver: “I don’t know.”

Adult supervisor (off camera): “No comment!”

Driver: “OK. No comment.”

Adult supervisor (off camera): “Say ‘no comment.’”

Halsne to second supervisor: “You don’t want to talk?  I mean, you were helping supervise as well.”

Second adult supervisor: “No comment.”

After this encounter, Halsne immediately contacted the Seattle Parks and Rec Department. They spent several days conducting their own internal investigation. According to spokesperson Dewey Potter, the adult supervisors with the kids that day were technically not city employees, rather employees of a non-profit agency called the Associated Recreation Counsel. ARC is contracted by the city to run camp activities for Seattle Parks and Rec.  Potter says nobody should be driving city vans who don't follow the law. 

“It's clear the employee made a very questionable judgment call by letting those kids into that van without seat belts. We would never ordinarily do that. It won't happen again and we're grateful to you for bringing it to our attention.”

We showed our surveillance video to Kathryn Kruger, Executive Director of the Safety Restraint Coalition, a non-profit overseeing Washington's 1-800 Buck-L-UP campaign.

 “I think that if the risk management people were to watch this, they would be aghast! If I was one of the parents of one of those children, I would be mad! I would be upset because the parks department is supposed to care for my child while in their custody.”

Krueger says driving with children under 16 years old without placing them in a seat belt is against the law that should lead to a $124 fine per child, but the injury risks could be far more costly.

“The laws of physics say that if this vehicle stops for any reason, whether another vehicle pulls out or not, everybody in that car is going to keep going,”  Krueger told Halsne while reviewing tape of the incident. “This is unsafe. There's nobody I know of that thinks this is a perfectly acceptable thing to happen.”