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Lynn Oliver said when her slow-moving car bumped into a concrete planter in a North Salt Lake parking lot, the nylon air bags rushed out of the dash, wrenched the boy's head and broke his neck.
"From the sound of it, I thought a car had hit me, Oliver said Friday. "When the smoke filled the car, I thought someone bombed me."
The 41-year-old woman hurried out of the car and opened the passenger door. She said she unbuckled Jordan's seat belt and pulled out his limp body.
"I could tell by his eyes and his face, he wasn't breathing,"she said. "I was screaming for someone to help me, but people were looking out the windows like they were trying to figure out what I was doing. It didn't look like I was in an accident.
She carried Jordan into Cutler's, a restaurant, and a woman administered CPR on the boy until paramedics arrived.
North Salt Lake police officer John Herndon would not comment about the cause of the boy's death and would not release results of an autopsy performed this week.
Air bags have been known to cause broken limbs or burns on the arms from the pressurized chemicals, but Jordan's freak accident may be one of only two or three in the United States that resulted in a death, according to authorities.
Jeffrey Augenstein, a trauma surgeon at the University of Miami/Jackson Memorial Medical Center, never has documented an accident in which an air bag caused a death. He is conducting a study of the causes of automobile injuries for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
"In my studies, I have not seen any situation where a person was wearing his seatbelt and an air bag and there was a serious injury to the occupant," he said.
The only cases when an air bag deployment led to a death were when the victim did not wear a seatbelt, he said.
John Dame, assistant director of the Utah Highway Safety Division, has heard of only one or two cases in which air bags caused an injury.
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Air bags first were introduced in some police cars in the mid-1970's, Augenstein said. In the mid-1980's, Mercedes-Benz was the first commercial car to use them.
Today, most new cars have air bags. And all carmakers must equip their vehicles with dual air bags by 1998, according to U.S. regulations.
But air bags work only if they are used in conjunction with seat belts.
"If you add an air bag to the belt system, you increase that somewhere from 10 percent to 15 percent."
The downside to air bags is they are made to deploy aggressively, sometimes at low impacts. That is because carmakers must meet safety guidelines in a world where drivers generally do not like to use seat belts, Augenstein said.
"You have a device that works very well with high-force crashes, but is (lacking when it needs to) work with the (low-force) crashes."
The victim's grandfather, Mark Oliver, said he will
Mark Oliver, 46, said he has contacted an attorney and wants answers on how the tragic accident could happen.
"Everyone is totally incensed," he said. "A device that is supposed to save lives has taken one."
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