Three-year-old Brianna Jones was very independent, according to her mother. She liked playing on her own. So when she told her mother she wanted to watch television, her mother set up a new Barbie movie that had been purchased the day before and left her alone to watch while she went down to the kitchen.
When her mother hadn’t heard from Brianna in about 15 minutes she called out to her and when she didn’t respond she went upstairs to find her daughter hanging from a window blind. Christianna “Christi” Frink Jones knew what to do. She had been a medic in the Air Force for six years. But she was too late. The CPR was unsuccessful.
Christi and her husband Christopher are both now MP’s in the Army stationed at Ft. Campbell, KY. The horrible accident occurred last Tuesday at their home in Clarksville, TN, just outside the base. Christi is a 2001 graduate of Great Mills H.S. but also attended her first two years at Leonardtown, H.S. Her father and step-mother, Tim and Molly Frink, live in Hollywood, and her mother and step father, Rita and Nathan Laulis, live in Piney Point. Both families helped take care of Brianna and her little sister Alexis while their parents were stationed in Iraq last year.
Family members are devastated but they agreed to talk to the Bay Net in hopes that their story might help save lives in the future. According to the National Consumer Product Safety Commission about a life a month is lost from strangulation from window blinds.
Christi Jones says her daughter when she was outside “loved adrenaline and loved getting dirty.” But when she came inside she loved having her mother paint her fingertips and put on makeup. Mrs. Jones believes her daughter climbed up on a couch and wrapped the cord around her neck as if it was necklace and slipped off the couch while playing.
By all accounts Brianna was a daddy’s girl. Mr. Jones said every time he came home she said, “Daddy’s home” and wanted them to play together. Mrs. Jones noted that family was the center of their life. When they came home their children were at that center and they did what the children wanted them to do. “We always though we took such great care of our kids,” she said.
It’s impossible for parents to watch their kids 24/7. “I don’t know if it was preventable,” Mrs. Jones said. But she believes blinds can be made to prevent hangings by designing them so they break away with a certain amount of pressure.
And Grandfather Tim Frink is on a mission to get the word out to the blind manufacturers and the Consumer Product Safety Commission that design changes can be made. During the interview at the Frink home in Hollywood, he showed a reporter changes he made to his own home’s blinds to raise the pulley heights so t
