A healthy 17-month-old boy stopped breathing and briefly lost consciousness while sleeping beside his mother. The cause was a strand of her hair, wound so tightly around his neck that he turned blue. The case, published online in August 2026 in Trauma Case Reports, shows how a near-invisible accident can leave marks that closely resemble deliberate strangulation.
The boy woke within minutes and showed no lasting neurological problems. Before anyone could call it an accident, though, investigators had to rule out the possibility that someone had hurt him. The report's author, Lydia Kahn of the Swedish National Board of Forensic Medicine and Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, presents the case as a lesson for clinicians, forensic specialists, and caregivers.
