We were carjacked at gunpoint and thrown in the trunk while our baby was in the back seat - now our nightmare is saving lives

As they lay trapped in the pitch black trunk of their car, all Janette and Greig Fennell could think about was the safety of their nine-month-old son.

Moments before, the couple had been forced into their vehicle at gunpoint by masked thugs.

But even more terrifying for the couple was the fact that their baby had been on the back seat at the time.

Speaking to DailyMail.com about the harrowing night in 1995, she recalled: 'They got in the car and all we heard them say was, there's a baby'.

But try as they might, the couple could not free themselves and so began an ordeal which saw them go hours thinking their son Alex had been kidnapped or killed.

The nightmare unfolded as the Fennells were returning home from dinner at a friend's house.

They pulled into their garage as usual, but before the door could shut, a group of men wearing gloves and Halloween masks swarmed their White Lexus.

They forced the couple into the trunk and sped off into the night. 

'As that was happening, I'm like to my husband, "Can you hear the baby? Can you hear the baby?"' Janette told DailyMail.com. 'And then, you know, like your mind does crazy things.

'I'm like, "oh, I just saw this show on Oprah that says if you don't get away in the first five minutes, you're dead and you know, and we're talking crazy like that and we're starting to pray and I kept saying, "Can you hear him? Can you hear him?"'

With their thoughts racing and time ticking by, they began desperately trying to claw their way out but to no avail.

'Nothing makes sense at that point except for, you know, you wanna survive and you, you wanna figure out, you know how you're gonna keep the baby safe, I mean at nine months they can never be alone,' she added.

Eventually, they were driven to a secluded spot south of San Francisco where the masked men opened the trunk once again.

'I popped up because I wanted to try to get a sense for where they had taken us  and that's when I got hit with the butt of the gun in the back of my head and shoved back down,' Janette said.

They were forced to hand over their jewelry, valuables and pin codes under threat of death if they lied.

'They go to my husband and they use the gun like to separate his collar, to make sure he doesn't have a necklace on that they want. I mean, he could have been gone right there,' she added.

'They took everything and the very last thing they said to us before they close the trunk again was, "If this isn't the right pin number, we're gonna come back and kill you".'

With that they slammed the trunk shut and sped off in a waiting get away vehicle, leaving the couple for dead.

But in a moment Janette calls 'divine intervention', she spied a light shining on a device, which turned out to be the internal trunk release mechanism.

The couple managed to make their escape and dialed 911 begging police for help.

Miraculously Alex was located safe and sound shortly after. The kidnappers had deposited him unharmed in the foyer of the family's home.

But in the weeks and years that followed that fateful night, Janette struggled to adjust and was haunted by one officer's words that situations like hers don't usually end as it did.

With the kidnappers still at large, she was plagued by thoughts of something similar happening to someone else.

'I thought this was crazy. How, how can you put somebody in their own trunk and they can't get out?' she said.

Fueled by her rage, Fennell wrote to car manufacturers demanding to know why vehicles do not come with emergency latch releases as standard. 

After getting no response, she kicked her campaign up a notch by compiling the first ever data set on the amount of accidents involving people locked in trunks.

But in a pre-Google world, this involved sifting through pages of newspaper cuttings and court transcripts.'

'I'd put in 'trunk' and 'locked in' and get 10k matches,' she explained. 'Then, I'd spend hours reading through every single result.' 

Her efforts uncovered some alarming statistics - 931 incidents involving 1,082 people.

In a quarter of the cases the victim died either from heat stroke, asphyxiation, or hypothermia.

Victims were typically children who had climbed in while playing or people who were being kidnapped. 

For the next four years Fennell, battled to get her voice heard - in the process discovering she was not the first to petition for the change.

Each time vehicle manufacturers were stubbornly resistant to implementing the change, citing prohibitive costs.

However the tenacious mom uncovered modelling from the 1970s which showed that the devices would cost just 3 cents per car to make and install.

Her fortunes improved following a meeting with then US-rep Bart Stupak who took an interest in the case.

He sponsored a bill to require a study of trunk entrapment and the Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration formed a panel to investigate.

Despite some initial reticence the panel passed a mandate in 1999 by one vote.

The mandate stipulates that all vehicles from 2002 must be equipped with a latch release mechanism in the trunk.

Since then there has been no evidence of a trunk related death with the device installed.

However, not content with her victory, Fennell has continued to campaign for better car safety, forming the non-profit Kids and Car Safety.

Today she is recognized as the national leader for child safety in vehicles and can take credit for innovations such as safer window controls and brake-to-shift interlock systems on automatic cards

'I just think, you know, part of the message needs to be that we all suffer from, "It's not gonna happen to me",' Janette explained. 'But nothing could be further from the truth.'