Calls for safety measures after Rotherham baby chokes to death on stylus pen tip

Alfie Moore-Scarpelli was just 11 months old when he lost his life

Author: Ben BasonPublished 15th Aug 2018

A heartbroken Rotherham couple wants more safety measures after their baby choked to death on part of a stylus pen.

11 month old Alfie Moore-Scarpelli couldn't be saved after he ihaled a tiny rubber tip of a stylus back in February.

Now his parents want companies who make them to look at safety measues like air-holes to prevent it ever happening to anyone else.

Dad Dwain told Hallam it's had a huge impact on them all:

"A parent shouldn't bury their children. The children should bury their parents. It should have been the other way round - I've said it ever since. He should be burying me, not me burying him."

Mum Becky says he'll never be forgotten:

"His absence is very noticeably missed every day. It's just like a hole in your heart that could never be filled again. We'd swap in a hearbeat if we could. I'd give my life for him any day."

"There's a lot of wondering what he'd be like now as he'd grown older. Would he have learnt to walk? We're never going to know."

The item Alfie inhaled was a rubber tip of a stylus pen for a tablet - which was less than a centimetre in length.

He was rushed to hospital but couldn't be saved.

Dwain says small parts like that should have holes in like biro pen lids do:

"Could companies that make the stylus pens and the accessories not find a way of creating something like that? So that if it were to ever happen to someone else, they'll not have to suffer what we've gone through. And that's one of the main reasons for this.

"It should be properly looked at. They need to be made so that if it ever does occur there are means and ways around the fact of it taking someone's life."

Becky agrees:

"So that if these were to be inhaled by anybody there's still an airhole somewhere, where you can still get air in and out the body. Because I'm a big beleiver that if there was and it was designed a bit better, Alfie would be poorly but he'd still be here."

Becky and Dwain says they're in talks with Trading Standards about the product which led to Alfie's death. But they want widespread change for similar items being sold in shops around the UK.