It was a missing boy that created the excitement on a November afternoon last year. 

The police made their rounds in the neighborhood that day, stopping to ask Jessica Larsen, 11, if she had seen anything unusual. When she heard the whirling of the search helicopter circling her south Mesa neighborhood, she wanted to get a better look. 

Her dad, Guy Larsen, was making dinner. He remembers Jessica zooming by and getting the okay to open a window. It’s family policy to ask—the security system beeps when a window is opened to alert Guy and Carolyn, Jessica’s mom, for security and energy-conservation purposes. Guy recalls hearing the beep of the window opening, and he went back to what he was doing. 

Then the screaming began.

At first, Guy and Carolyn weren’t sure where the cries were coming from. But then they heard Jessica’s sister, Maria. “Jessica is yelling!” she said. Frantically trying to locate his daughter, Guy ran out the front door, rounded the corner and peered over the wall to the backyard. That’s where he saw her, with Carolyn, who had run out the back door. 

“I fell,” said Jessica, sitting up with her hands and arms supporting her body weight. “My back hurts and I can’t feel my legs. My legs floated away.”

Second-story windows in homes used to be fairly rare in Maricopa County. Houses built before the boom of the 1990s were typically ranch-style, all-on-one-floor dwellings. That’s changed. Two-story homes, many with vaulted ceilings, have sprung up in many new Valley subdivisions, often on farmland devoid of shade trees. The Larsens had never lived in a two-story home but they didn’t think of it any differently than they would a one-story because it didn’t have any balconies. 

“It’s all enclosed,” Guy says. “The windows, we figured, were secure.”

One thing has always been true about life in the desert, however: the sun gets hot. And bright. One way to keep energy costs down is to keep the sun from blasting through the windows. Products have been designed to do this; one option is solar window screens.

 Mounted on the outside of the window frame, solar screens are advertised to block 80 to 90 percent of the sun’s heat and light. After installation, the bug screen that often comes standard with new windows distorts the view, so many families remove it. 

Installation methods for solar screens vary; the type of tab used to anchor the screen varies, too. Some companies even use Velcro to place the screens. Solar screen kits for do-it-yourselfers are available; some come with plastic tabs to anchor the screen.

The four slim metal tabs anchoring the solar screen on Jessica’s bedroom window weren’t enough to keep her from pitching forward through the screen as she peered up to the sky, looking for the helicopter. She somersaulted out of the window, barely missing the block wall right next to the house. She landed in a seated position on the ground, two stories below her bedroom window. The screen landed beside her, still intact in the metal frame. The screen did not tear.

No matter what kind of screen is on a window, parents need to know this: no window screen is intended to be a safety device. The Arizona Department of Health Services does not track data on falls through window screens per se, says Tomi St. Mars, R.N., injury prevention specialist. But she reports that 78 children under the age of 12 required emergency care for falls from buildings in 2008. Though there were no deaths, 22 children were hospitalized.

“Parents should not let kids play around windows,” says St. Mars. “Falls can happen whether there is a screen there or not.” 

Lanny Berke, a certified product safety expert based in Minnesota, says a spate of falls from apartment buildings in Minneapolis led to the recent passage of legislation, dubbed Laela’s Law, requiring new building code standards for windows. Similar laws are pending in Missouri, Iowa, and Wisconsin. 

Berke hopes that injury claims filed against screen manufacturers eventually will affect the entire industry, similar to what happened with automatic garage doors built before 1993. (In that case, federal safety standards were tightened to require an automatic reversal feature and optical sensors, and the number of injuries declined.) 

In 2001, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) called for more widely available products that can prevent falls from windows without preventing egress in case of fire. Innovation in screen safety is sorely needed, says Berke. The optional warning label sign on screens is simply not enough.

It took six hours of surgery, two titanium rods and 12 titanium screws to repair Jessica’s thoracic spinal area. But her spinal cord was twisted, bruised and damaged from the fall.

She remembers it well. “I looked up and the screen was on the ground,” she says. “I called my sister’s name, and she told my mom and dad. She threw me my teddy bear, Kendra—who was with me through everything.” 

Jessica has regained some use of her legs; there is hope for more. “I’m still the same me,” she says during an interview one hot summer day in July. She’s learning to dribble a basketball from her wheelchair. She plays the violin. 

“I have lots of energy. I like to bounce around,” she says. “And I used to dance a lot. I was going to have a career dancing.”

When Guy and Carolyn Larsen drive around their south Mesa neighborhood these days, they notice more and more windows fitted with solar screens. So they want to get the word out. “We look up, and we just want to stop the car,” says Guy. “And tell everybody.”