HOUSTON, Texas (WIVB) – Chances are good that if you have a toddler, he or she has light-up shoes. A story in Texas is making parents everywhere consider throwing them in the trash.
A Houston mother woke up over the weekend to find her SUV on fire. Officials found her two-year-old son’s light-up shoes charred inside the vehicle.
“I’m just glad that my son wasn’t wearing it at the time, and if he had been wearing it, I don’t know if he could have told me, ‘My foot’s hot,” the mother said. “I don’t think he could have taken it off by himself.”
The Fire Marshal thought the shoes likely started the fire, and the mother is glad it happened overnight and not while her son was wearing them.
This has parents asking, “Are light-shoes unsafe?”
These are the same shoes that the family in Texas had: Jake and the Never Land Pirates light-up sneakers, purchased at Payless:
Here’s what is inside the shoes:
Payless released a statement on the matter, saying, “First and foremost, safety is always a top priority at Payless, and we take the claim made by the customer seriously. We have contacted the family, and we will work with them and local authorities to better understand the circumstances of the car fire and what may have caused it.”
This appears to be an isolated incident. News 4 has searched for any other reports of fires involving light-up shoes and haven’t found any.
The consumer product safety commission doesn’t have any warnings about these shoes. Fire experts we reached out to say lithium ion batteries can malfunction, but they had not heard of this happening before with a pair of shoes.