Locked in the pitch-black trunk 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 by masked criminals at gunpoint.
But even more frightening for the couple was the fact that their baby was in the backseat at the time.
Speaking to DailyMail.com about the terrifying night in 1995, she said: ‘They got into the car and all we heard them say was, ‘There’s a baby.’
But no matter how hard they tried, the couple could not free themselves and so began an ordeal that left them thinking for hours that their son Alex had been kidnapped or murdered.
Janette and Greig Fennell were robbed at gunpoint in their car in 1995 and forced into the trunk, with their baby son Alex still strapped into the backseat. Pictured: The family a few years after the incident
The nightmare unfolded when the Fennells returned home from dinner at a friend’s house.
They drove into their garage as usual, but before the door could close, a group of men wearing gloves and Halloween masks arrived in their white Lexus.
They forced the couple into the trunk and drove away into the night.
‘As 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 thought, ‘Oh, I just saw a show on Oprah that said if you don’t get out of here in the first five minutes, you’re dead and you know, and we’re talking this crazy thing and we start praying and I kept saying, ‘Can you hear him? Can you hear him?’”
As their minds raced and time passed, they tried desperately to get out, but in vain.
“At that point, nothing makes sense except you want to survive and figure out how to keep the baby safe. I mean, at nine months, they can never be alone,” she added.
Eventually, they were driven to a remote location south of San Francisco, where the masked men reopened the trunk.
“I showed up to find out where they had taken us and I got hit in the back of the head with the butt of the gun and was pushed back down,” Janette said.
The kidnappers drove them to a remote location before attacking them, robbing them and leaving them for dead. Miraculously, they managed to find a latch on the trunk and escape
They were forced to hand over their jewelry, valuables and PIN numbers, under threat of death if they lied.
“They go to my husband and use the gun to unclip his collar, to make sure he doesn’t have a chain on that they want. I mean, he could have just been gone,” she added.
‘They took everything and the very last thing they said to us before they closed the trunk again was, “If this is not the correct PIN code, we will come back and kill you.”‘
They then slammed the trunk shut and drove away in a waiting getaway car, leaving the couple for dead.
But in a moment that Janette calls “divine intervention,” she saw a light shine on a device that turned out to be the internal trunk release mechanism.
The couple managed to escape and called 911 to ask the police for help.
Miraculously, Alex was found safe and sound shortly afterward, having been left unharmed in the hallway of the family home by his kidnappers.
But in the weeks and years after that fateful night, Janette struggled to adjust and was haunted by the words of an officer who said situations like hers usually don’t end the way they did.
With the kidnappers still at large, she was plagued by the thought that something similar might happen to someone else.
The intruders grabbed the then nine-month-old baby Alex and dropped him on his parents’ porch before quickly driving away
“I thought this was crazy. How, how can you put someone in their own trunk and not be able to get out?” she said.
Fennell flew into a rage and wrote a letter to automakers asking why cars don’t come standard with emergency unlocking systems.
When she received no response, she continued her campaign by compiling the first-ever dataset on the number of accidents involving people locked in car trunks.
But in the days before Google, this meant wading through pages of newspaper clippings and court records.’
“I typed in ‘trunk’ and ‘locked in’ and got 10,000 matches,” she explained. “Then I spent hours reading every single result.”
Her efforts produced some alarming statistics: 931 incidents involving 1,082 people.
In a quarter of cases, the victim died of heatstroke, suffocation or hypothermia.
Victims were usually children who had climbed into the water while playing or people who had been abducted.
After the ordeal, Jannette dedicated her life to campaigning for the devices to be installed on all cars. Pictured: The Fennells today. including son Alex (second from right) who was just a baby at the time of the crime
Fennell began collecting her own data on trunk entrapment and managed to convince a Michigan delegate to help her campaign
Over the next four years, Fennell fought to have her voice heard, only to discover that she was not the first to petition for change.
Automakers continued to stubbornly refuse to implement the change, arguing that the costs would be too high.
However, the persistent mother discovered models from the 1970s that showed the devices would cost just 3 cents per car to make and install.
Her fortunes improved after she met with then-U.S. Representative Bart Stupak, who showed interest in the case.
He introduced a bill requiring an investigation into trunk entrapment, and the Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration appointed a panel to investigate.
Despite some initial reluctance, the panel adopted a mandate by one vote in 1999.
The mandate requires all vehicles built since 2002 to be equipped with a trunk release mechanism.
Her Work The Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has mandated that all trunks on vehicles from model year 2002 onwards must be equipped with emergency trunk releases
Since then, no evidence has been found of a death in the trunk with the device installed.
Fennell, however, was not satisfied with her victory and continued her advocacy for better car safety, founding the non-profit organization Kids and Car Safety.
Today, it is recognized as the national leader in child vehicle safety and can be held responsible for innovations such as safer window controls and brake-shift interlock systems on automatic maps.
“I just think, you know, part of the message has to be that we all suffer from, ‘It won’t happen to me,’” Janette explained. “But nothing could be further from the truth.”