Remembering Sammie Joyce Volmert is a Facebook page dedicated to the memory of a young girl who lost her life in a tragic incident in her own home.
Keri Hall Volmert created the page to help raise awareness of the dangers of sleeping on a different floor from your children, as she has bravely shared the story of how her 17-month-old daughter lost her life.
February 28, 2016, was the last time Keri Volmert saw her daughter, Sammie Volmert, alive.
In a Facebook post on the memorial page, Volmert detailed what happened to her daughter and urged people to share the post, so that other families could hear about and learn from her family's tragedy.
“I think Sammie is dead,” were the words that mom Keri was met with in the morning from her husband, who had gone to retrieve the little girl from her room upstairs.
On the post, Volmert wrote: “Attempts to resuscitate her did not work and she was pronounced dead fifty minutes later at the emergency room.”
The parents later learned that the heater upstairs in Sammie’s room had malfunctioned, and it had “felt like a sauna.”
“The temperature registered 99 degrees on our thermostat which was as high as it could go,” explained mom Keri.
Doctors then told the Volmerts that their daughter had most likely never woken up or made a sound since young toddlers cannot regulate their own body temperature.
Tragically, the parents had been asleep downstairs in their bedroom while unknowingly the heater’s temperature upstairs had risen to such dangerous levels.
Mom Keri and her husband have another child - their son Jackson - who was three years old at the time. He was also sleeping downstairs in their room when the incident occurred.
However, Volmert went on to say: “Doctors said he would have likely died if he had been in his room” which was also upstairs.
For this reason, mom Keri wanted to raise awareness among other families, particularly for those who also sleep on different floors than their children.
As mentioned in the post, she understands what it is like to be a worried mother, saying that upon preparing to become a mom she read “multiple books and stories on possible dangers that could harm babies and toddlers.”
But, the doting mom never came across room temperature as a possible hazard.
“There is a cheap temperature monitor I could have had if I had heard of even one instance where a child could die by a heater not turning off like it is supposed to,” Volmert wrote.
Mom Keri was shocked to find that there were cases similar to theirs and hopes that by sharing her story then “other families [are] spared from the horrific grief” that her family now has to endure.
Now six years on from the incident, the family are still raising awareness. On the anniversary of their daughter’s birthday this year, the Volmerts held a stuffed animal donation for charity The WARM Place - which has become somewhat of a tradition to honor their daughter's life.
Keri Volmert hopes that honoring her daughter’s life and sharing this tragedy will prevent any future deaths like her daughter’s.
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