Toweling off after a shower 2½ years ago, Kim Healey heard a piercing cry and raced to a window in her suburban Randolph, N.J., home. On the driveway 11 feet below she saw a broken screen and heard her son Timmy, 7, weeping. "When I found him," says Healey, who realized the boy had fallen, "he was sitting up and crying." But by the time medical help arrived, Timmy had lost consciousness. He fell into a coma and died a week later. "What I think happens," says Healey, 38, "is your life stops and you have to start over."
For Healey, a major part of the recovery process is the Timothy Healey Foundation, which urges consumers to use window-safety devices—including guards. Nationwide more than 4,700 children are injured falling out of windows each year, 72 percent of them from second and third floors. "It's really an epidemic," says Ann Brown, chairman of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, which, with help from Healey, approved new window-guard standards in May. "But numbers don't tell you what it's like to lose a child," adds Brown. "A mother can."
Shy but energetic, Healey divides her days between a part-time job at a local gym and the foundation Web site, which lists safety tips. Yet the foundation is also a constant reminder of the sense of loss she shares with her husband, Stephen, 39, vice president at a real estate firm, and their sons Ryan, 12, and Tyler, 8. "We're still able to go to a baseball game and laugh," she says. "But in the back of your head there is always Timmy."
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