The weight of the dresser had suffocated the little boy. And though family members were within earshot, no one heard a crash because Ted’s body absorbed the impact of the falling dresser. McGee and her husband, Jeremy, assumed their tragedy was a freakish occurrence. But they soon discovered that Ted was just one of many victims of what safety regulators categorize as a “furniture tip-over,” a sometimes fatal event affecting thousands of U.S. families each year. The McGees also learned that the dresser, an Ikea Malm, had been linked to previous tip-over deaths. Ikea did not decide to recall the product until four months after Ted died.

The tip-over problem is epidemic: Someone in the U.S. is injured every 17 minutes by a furniture, television, or appliance tip-over, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission. After declining for a few years, estimated tip-over injuries for children younger than 6 involving dressers and other clothing storage units increased in 2016 to 2,800 from 2,100 the year before, or by 33 percent, according to the CPSC.

Dressers and other clothing storage units account for at least 11 percent of furniture tip-over injuries, according to the CPSC. But it’s the number of tip-over deaths in the category—there were 195 reported to the CPSC between 2000 and 2016—that particularly makes it a crisis.