Richardson, Texas ? It was Adrianna’s day to go shopping at the mall, and her mom was looking forward to it. Mother and daughter alone together.

Just three weeks before, Rachel Clemens’ own mother had died after a long illness and in the past week she’d organized her son Andrew’s seventh birthday party. She and her husband, David, had taken Adrianna and Andrew bowling with his friends and a couple of them had spent the night.

The next day, Oct. 9, 2004, a Saturday, would be Adrianna’s day, although for this family it would forever be linked with tragedy.

David had made breakfast for everyone and cleaned up while Rachel and 2-year-old Adrianna took a bath.

“I was blow-drying my hair,” Rachel recalls. “I flipped my hair over. I looked up and she wasn’t there.” Adrianna probably went upstairs to see her brother and his friends, she thought.

Then she heard David’s screams.

He had told her he was going to move their SUV so he could get into a storage area above the garage ceiling to retrieve some decorations for Halloween.

“Adrianna must have come out of the kitchen and out to the garage,” she says. “And he backed out.”

Little Adrianna was hit by a 2 1/2-ton mass of steel.

Their precious little girl, whose raven hair and dark eyes resembled her mother’s, was gone. She was pronounced dead at the hospital.

Two children a week

Adrianna was one of more than 1,200 children under 15 who were killed since 2000 in nontraffic motor vehicle accidents in the United States. Half of those fatalities were in backovers, almost all of them involving children under 5, according to Kids and Cars, a child safety advocacy group in Leawood, Kan.

Each week, at least two children are killed and another 50 are hurt in backover accidents. Over three days in April, six children were killed; by the end of the month, 11 more died, the group said.

Rear cameras and audible warning sensors, technology that could reduce the number of fatalities, are not considered safety equipment by automakers and are offered only as optional parking aids in most vehicles. It could be years before they become as ubiquitous as seat belts.

“Everybody says the worst thing that could ever happen is the death of a child,” says Janette Fennell, the advocacy group’s founder and president. “What’s different in these, in over 70 percent of the cases, it’s a direct relative of the child that’s behind the wheel – mom or dad, grandma or grandpa, aunt or uncle.”

Losing a child, compounded by unimaginable guilt over who was responsible for the accident, leaves families traumatized and immobilized in their grief. With no easy answers for why it happened to their child or their family, anger and blame often are misdirected. The strain on relationships can be tremendous.

Rachel and David believed they’d taken all the precautions to protect their children. They had installed a fence around the backyard swimming pool, with a gate latch high enough so the kids couldn’t reach it. But when they purchased their Infiniti QX4, they were coaxed into getting a sunroof. No mention was made of rear cameras that could help them see better as they back up, Rachel says.

“My husband and I were comatose for months” after Adrianna died, Rachel says, and she still appears broken and frail, seated in an overstuffed chair in the den of their suburban Dallas home.

1 mph can be lethal

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, in a report to Congress in November, said backover accidents are not a recent phenomenon. But NHTSA disputes perceptions that the number of accidents is increasing as the size of the nation’s vehicle fleet grows – led by SUVs and minivans, which tend to have larger rear blind zones.

A study by Consumer Reports magazine suggests SUVs, pickups and minivans are longer and taller and their blind zones extend as much as 50 feet from the rear bumper. These factors contribute to poor visibility, the report says.

While NHTSA cites groups like Kids and Cars for raising awareness of backover fatalities, it concedes that any statistics collected “very likely underestimate the true extent of the backover crash problem.”

What’s clear is that from 1991 through 2004, federal figures show an average of 76 backover fatalities annually on public roads, almost three-fourths of them involving passenger cars, pickups and SUVs. The report said most of the dead were children under 5.

Fennell’s database shows backovers claimed the lives of 104 children under 15 in 2005 and again in 2006.

Devices like audible warning sensors or rear cameras are standard in some luxury brands and only about 100 vehicle models. Warning sensors can add $100 to a vehicle’s price, a camera system about $300 – still cheaper than aftermarket cameras and sensors, which range from $150 to over $1,000.

“Our government, and rightfully so, has put a lot of focus on belts and air bags, and if you do all those right things and are unfortunate to get in a crash, you might be able to walk away,” Fennell says. “But they’ve totally ignored the fact that at 1 mph, the interaction of a child and vehicle is lethal.”