Learning more about sleep-related infant deaths in Arkansas requires collecting coroner’s reports, mostly on paper, one county at a time.
Full coverage + online extras
Day 3:
- Stopping killer of babies takes money; how Arkansas, others try to curb sleep deaths
- How babies die sleeping: Details from a few cases
Day 2:
- Parents can face charges; unsafe sleep deaths sometimes a crime
- How babies die sleeping: Details from a few cases
Day 1:
Arkansas has no central agency where infant death records are publicly available.
The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette developed this series by collecting coroners’ reports from Arkansas’ five most populous counties.
Using the state’s Freedom of Information Act, the newspaper requested reports on deaths of infants (ages birth to 1 year) that occurred between 2010 and 2016 in Benton, Faulkner, Pulaski, Sebastian and Washington counties.
Those county coroners responded with more than 1,100 pages of reports, in no standardized format, on 243 deaths of babies from all causes, including stillbirths.
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From those files, the newspaper identified 102 cases in which infants were asleep or in sleep surroundings and had died unexpectedly. The records suggested no other cause of death, such as illness. Coroners or medical examiners also identified them as unexplained sleep-related deaths or asphyxia in bed.
The Democrat-Gazette created its own database, which included cases from Pulaski, Benton, Faulkner and Sebastian counties. Reports from Washington County didn’t include any infant sleep-related deaths.
The database helped reporters identify sleep position, bedding and other circumstances surrounding each of the deaths.
The newspaper also downloaded state-by-state and county-by-county numerical data concerning infant deaths that are maintained by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
Reporters interviewed national and state public health experts and researchers, doctors and nurses, prosecutors, law enforcement officers and grief support group members for this series, as well as parents who lost children to sleep death.