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In honor of her son, Christi Carrano is fighting for federal ice cream truck safety laws.
Carrano lost her beloved son, Tristan Barhorst, in 2020 when the 10-year-old was struck by a car and killed after buying a treat from an ice cream truck in Wallingford, Connecticut.
“He was an old soul. He was kind of empathetic, loving, thoughtful, selfless, smart, incredibly funny, extremely athletic, thankful and creative,” Carrano told Fox News Digital.
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“There are not enough words to describe what he was and the hole that we’re left with, with him being gone.”
The truck that sold her son his last ice cream treat had lights, a stop sign and other safety features on it — but the driver chose not to activate those assets because it was daytime, Carrano said.
Carrano said her son was at a backyard celebration for his father’s birthday. When an ice cream truck came driving down the street, a large group of kids went out front to greet it.
The truck parked on the opposite side of the road, drawing kids from the party to cross the street. There were no children on the other side.
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Tristan ordered his ice cream first — and once he had it, he was crossing the street by himself to return to the house when a car going 40 mph in a 25 mph zone struck him.
The driver, a teenager, had no charges pressed against him by the family.
The mother took her tragedy and has been using it to spread awareness to help protect other children from a similar misfortune.
In 2022, Carrano successfully helped get a law passed in Connecticut that requires ice cream trucks to install and use proper safety equipment such as warning lights, stop signs and a crossing arm.
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“Tristan’s Law” requires all traffic to stop 10 feet in front of or behind an ice cream truck when the front crossing arm is extended.
The law also prohibits trucks from selling ice cream on any road with a speed limit greater than 25 miles per hour or within 500 feet of an elementary or middle school on school days.
Carrano is urging federal action to enact a similar law.
Carrano said she has done her research and ice cream truck incidents are underreported.
“There are no good statistics right now, and [losing] one child is far too many,” she said.
Amber Rollins, director of Kids and Car Safety, based in the Kansas City area, told Fox News Digital that current federal data reporting on ice cream truck incidents is off.
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“We only have a small number of ice cream truck-related incidents in our database,” Rollins said.
“That’s just the tip of the iceberg.”
Rollins said a big issue with gathering information is that the reporting neglects “non-traffic” incidents.
“We’re missing a huge portion of cases because a lot of these things happen in parking lots and driveways and other off-roadway locations,” she said.
The current federal incident reporting covers just accidents on public roads.
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“NHTSA’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) contains data on every fatal motor vehicle traffic crash within the 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico,” a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration official said in a statement emailed to Fox News Digital.
“To be included in FARS, a traffic crash must involve a motor vehicle traveling on a traffic way customarily open to the public and must result in the death of a vehicle occupant or a nonoccupant within 30 days of the crash.”
The official added, “FARS does not uniquely identify ice cream trucks in the data.”
Rollins said the biggest goal of Kids and Car Safety is to get everyone who is working on vehicle safety and injury prevention issues “to start looking at vehicle injuries and deaths as a whole, instead of separating them out into these two categories of traffic and non-traffic.”
She added, “You’re missing so much of the story when you do it that way.”
Fox News Digital spoke with Janette Fennell, president and founder of Kids And Car Safety, in 2021.
She said another issue is “the incident may not be pegged to an ‘ice cream truck,’ and instead may include the term ‘slushie, ice-cream, ice cream, icey, snow cone, snowcone, sno-cone, sno cone, popsicle, treat, shaved ice, kona ice or ice.’”
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., introduced federal legislation in 2021 to reward states that implement such regulations. It would also require the Department of Transportation to find a way to track such injuries and deaths more appropriately.
“This kind of tragic accident is by no means unique or even rare, and that’s the reason I have proposed federal legislation that would incentivize states to do what Connecticut did after Tristan’s death,” Blumenthal said in a statement emailed to Fox News Digital.
“It is a tribute to Tristan’s parents that they worked tirelessly for Tristan’s law here in Connecticut, which requires ice cream trucks — like the one that provided Tristan with [his last treat] — to have cross warning signs, flashing lights and other features that we regard as everyday equipment for school buses,” he added.
The bill has been referred to the Commerce Committee and is still under consideration.
Fox News Digital reached out to the Department of Transportation for further comment.
