Mother Jones excerpt

. . . Greg Storts last saw his son Shane alive at 2:30 a.m. on August 3, 1990. He looked in on Shane when he came home from his job at a Tulsa, Okla., print shop, and found the three-week-old baby stirring in the Converta-Cradle his wife, Pamela, had bought.

Unlike traditional cradles that rock from side to side, the Converta-Cradle rocked from head to toe, and its design allowed the cradle to hang on a frame so it could also be used as a swing. Storts wound up the crank that set the cradle in motion, and went to bed.

He was awakened at 6 a.m. by Pamela's hysterical screams. "When I saw Shane, he was cold," Storts says. The medical examiner first ruled the cause of death as sudden infant death syndrome, but has since classified it as "undetermined."

In the years that followed, the Storts had two more children, and slowly tried to put the tragedy behind them. Then in May 1995 -- five years after his son's death -- Storts caught the end of an NBC news report that detailed the recall of Graco's Converta-Cradle, suspected of having caused infant deaths.

Storts contacted a lawyer, David Matthews, who represented another family that had filed suit against Graco. Matthews told Storts that many of the deaths that had occurred in the Converta-Cradle initially had been attributed to SIDS or other causes, without taking into account the position of the cradle at the time of death.

Matthews now represents Storts, one of two plaintiffs still suing Graco over the cradle. (The other plaintiff is a parent whose baby died nearly a year after the product's recall.) The plaintiffs claim they have evidence showing that a flaw in the Converta- Cradle's design surfaced months before the cradle went to market. Graco's lawyer, Richard Bethea, says the cradle had nothing to do with the infant fatalities. "Those are SIDS deaths," Bethea says.

Graco sold about 169,000 Converta-Cradles. But, after the recall, only about half were returned, which means another 80,000 may remain in circulation, stored in attics or passed on to other families through donations and yard sales.