Baby monitor videos yield evidence for long-suspected link between seizures and unexplained toddler deaths

The baby monitor didn’t go off. Any sound or motion in the twins’ room was supposed to set off an alarm — but in the wee hours of Nov. 27, 2022, Katie Czajkowski-Fell and Justin Fell weren’t woken up. They’d gotten it because of Hayden’s febrile seizures. These are common, generally nothing to worry about, the doctors said. Toddlers’ immune responses can be more assertive than adults’, burning into action against a world they’re still getting used to, routinely sparking high fevers, potentially irritating the brain. Hayden would likely grow out of them.

Still, Katie worried. Whenever he got sick, he began to convulse; she felt helpless, watching his eyes roll back. What if it happened during sleep? Hence the baby monitor, filming, storing footage, ready to trip an alarm.

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Hayden’s death is part of a pattern, described in a study published Thursday in the journal Neurology. In a registry of some 300 such cases, New York University researchers were able to find seven in which there was footage of the death, whether from baby monitors or “nanny cams” or security systems. In five of the recordings, including Hayden’s, experts saw motion that looked distinctly like some kind of convulsion. In the sixth, many thought they detected that same sort of movement, but weren’t all in agreement. The seventh was too grainy to tell.

The sample size is tiny, but the conclusions striking: video evidence supporting a long-suspected link between seizures and sudden death in young children. Hayden was the only one with a known history of seizures, yet something similar and seizure-like happened in the 30 minutes before most of these children died.