Story highlights
Bowdy Shoff lifted a dresser to free his trapped twin brother
Boys' parents tell others to anchor furniture to walls for safety
Two-year-old Brock Shoff owes his twin brother Bowdy big time.
The boys were playing at their home in Orem, Utah, on Friday morning when a dresser fell on Brock.
A home surveillance video shows Bowdy trying for almost 2 minutes to free his brother from under the furniture – eventually succeeding. The boys’ parents posted the video to social media to highlight the importance of securing furniture to make homes childproof, they said.
“We were hesitant to post this video initially,” Ricky Shoff, the boys’ father told CNN, “but a lot of parents have probably made the same mistake that we made: (They) don’t have their furniture secure or bolted to a wall.”
“Our house is very childproof. We are really cautious about all this stuff, so it never really crossed our minds that something like this could happen,” the father said.
The accident happened Friday morning, the Shoffs said.
“We didn’t hear anything. We normally hear them throwing their toys – they are super mischievous,” Ricky Shoff said.
It wasn’t until the boys’ mother, Kayli, woke up later and checked a surveillance camera that she saw the dresser on the floor.
She went to check on the boys, and “there wasn’t a scratch” on either of them, her husband said.
“It’s kind of a miracle. It’s something really special, to see how Bowdy helped Brock.”
Ricky Shoff works for a company that sells home-monitoring systems and has surveillance cameras throughout his house, he said.
The father says the dresser in his boys’ room was manufactured by Ikea. The Swedish furniture company made news last month when it paid $50 million to the families of three boys killed by its Malm line of dressers.
Ikea spokeswoman Mona Astra Liss told CNN that the company is working to confirm whether Ikea made the boys’ dresser.
“This video shows the importance of attaching all chests and dressers to the wall,” she said. “We want to emphasize that the best way to prevent the tip-over of chests of drawers is to anchor products to the wall. IKEA has included restraints with our chests of drawers for decades, and wall attachment is an integral part of the assembly instructions.”
Ikea said in the summer that it was recalling more than 100 lines of dressers, including the Malm. It offered customers refunds or free wall-anchoring kits.
Ricky Shoff was traveling Tuesday and said he could not provide CNN the specific model of dresser that was in Brock and Bowdy’s room.