Below is the original story that aired on “Dateline NBC” in July 2002.

FOR NORMA BRAINARD it was supposed to be a perfect weekend, a fun getaway to the coast just before Christmas in 1995. She had no idea it was a trip that would change her life forever.
Chris Hansen: “Were you wearing your seatbelt?”
Norma: “Yes, always.”
About an hour outside Portland, Norma’s friend, who was driving, tried to pull over to see the ocean, but was going too fast. He braked hard and hit the high curb in the median, running right over it.
Norma: “It was a very low-speed, low-impact accident where we basically went bump, bump up a curb.”
Hansen: “It wasn’t like smashing into a wall.”
Norma: “No.”
But it was hard enough to knock the front wheels back and trigger the airbags.
Norma: “It was like a boxing glove. I mean it just came at me so fast and so hard.”
So fast that Norma didn’t have time to blink. Her mascara left these imprints on the airbag.
Norma: “After that, I mean there was total darkness.”
Hansen: “Lights out.”
Norma: “Lights out. For a very long time.”
For six weeks, Norma says she couldn’t see a thing. Besides bruising on her face and a fractured nose, she had no other injuries. Her friend, the driver, wasn’t hurt at all.
Slowly, the vision in Norma’s right eye returned. But the damage in her left eye was permanent.
Norma: “I’m still legally blind in my left eye.
Hansen: “Just looking at your eyes, the left eye, the pupil is much larger than the right eye.”
Norma: “Yeah. The actual pupil’s been blown open and it can’t constrict anymore.”
The car Norma was riding in was a 1994 Nissan Altima. The focus is on its passenger-side airbag, an airbag used in all of the 1994 Altimas and the majority of the ’95 models, almost a quarter million vehicles in all. Norma is convinced there’s something terribly wrong with the way this airbag deploys and “Dateline” has learned she’s not the only one.
Therese: “It felt like I had been shot in the eye with an assault weapon.”
Shirley: “Pain, pain, pain.”
All of these people were passengers, too, riding in a 1994 or 1995 Nissan Altima when the cars got into minor to moderate accidents, causing the airbags to deploy.
Therese: “The airbag caused the back of my eye to rupture.”
Shirley: “My left eye was caved in.
Louise: “And you’d be wishing the Lord would take you.”
Billy: “It was bleeding.”
Melonie: “Broke my eye sockets.”
Rogers: “Legally blind.”
Rogers Ray says the 1994 Altima he was riding in was only going 10-15 mph when it slid into a fence pole, causing a dent. He says as he was opening his door to get out, the airbags deployed.
Rogers: “I should have been able to take the seatbelt off, walk out of that car and gone on with the rest of my life.”
Instead, Rogers says his blindness has turned him into a virtual shut-in and it’s traumatized his 13-year-old son.
Rogers: “He’s a very bitter kid. He is so protective of me. He can’t be a kid anymore.”
Billy Jones was hit by the same kind of airbag four years ago, but he says, he still has blurry vision, burning in his eyes, and headaches.
Billy: “I wanted to be a pilot or an astronaut and I just can’t see well enough to fly.”
Hansen: “At the age of 16, those dreams have disappeared.”
Billy: “Just crushed in an instant.”
And unlike other cases you hear about where small children have been killed by airbags because they were sitting too close to them, all of these people say they were seated back, away from the bag, right where they were supposed to be.
Hansen: “Give me a show of hands. How many of you were wearing your seatbelts properly at the time of your accidents?”
They all raise their hands. And just like Norma, these people are certain that if not for the airbag, they would have walked away from their accidents unhurt.
Rogers: “That bag didn’t touch me any other place than directly in the face.”
Baron: “I concluded that it was a blatantly stupid airbag.”
Larry Baron is Norma Brainard’s attorney and he’s represented a number of other Altima airbag victims as well. He says all you have to do is look at the way this airbag deploys and you’ll understand why it causes eye injuries. This crash test footage was shot in 1994 by the federal government’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA.
Baron: “You can see the bag, in the shape of an arm, coming out of the dashboard, driving into the occupant’s eyeballs.”
Hansen: “So it’s like a punch.”
Baron: “It’s like Mike Tyson’s arm coming out of the dashboard and smacking you in the eye.”
Baron says he’s clocked the airbag at speeds of up to 159 mph. And although many airbags are designed to deploy up and then out, Baron says the Altima airbag in question reaches too far back towards the passenger, striking this dummy well before it is fully inflated.
Hansen: “Is this what damaged Norma’s eyes?”
Baron: “Yes.”
Hansen: “Well explain something to me, because if this is a government videotape, presumably government investigators have looked at it. You would think somebody would say that, ‘hey wait a minute, change the design. Look it’s hitting them right in the eyes.’”
Baron: “It would be nice if that happened. It’s not that surprising to me it hasn’t happened for the simple reason that they are not looking for that.”
The government isn’t looking for eye injuries, it’s only checking for life-threatening injuries or death, tests which the 1994 Altima passed with flying colors.
Baron: “This dummy does not get out of the car at the end of the test and say, ‘I’m blind.’”
In all, “Dateline” has confirmed at least 25 people with permanent eye injuries, most of them legally blinded in at least one eye, after being in the passenger seat when the airbag deployed in a ’94 or early ’95 Altima.
And listen to this: In almost every case, it was only the passenger who got hurt. In fact, almost every driver walked away with no more than a scrape or a bruise.
Therese: “The driver was my husband and he’s perfect and looks beautiful.”
So if there’s a problem with the Altima’s airbags, why are the passengers getting hurt and not the drivers? It turns out that the driver’s side airbag has a completely different design.
Baron: “You can see it’s coming out nice and flat, shaping around the entire face.”
The driver’s side airbag expands before it reaches the crash dummy.
Hansen: “So in other words, the bag inflates before contact.”
Baron: “Bag inflates fully before contact, which is the way an airbag should work.”
The passenger-side airbag stays compact, inflating fully only after it hits the crash dummy.
Hansen: “Why would anybody design an airbag that way?”
Claybrook: “Beats me.”
Joan Claybrook, a long-time vocal critic of the auto industry, says although other cars’ airbags have caused eye injuries, she can’t name a single make or model with nearly as many as the ’94 and early ’95 Altima.
Claybrook: “And I should know, because I pay attention to this a lot. ”
She should know, she says, because, more than twenty years ago, she ran the government’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and has been lobbying for safer airbags ever since. Claybrook believes many of the older airbags are poorly designed and that the one on the passenger side of 1994 early 1995 Altima is especially dangerous.
Claybrook: “They put a crappy, cheap airbag instead of a decently designed one.”
Hansen: “I daresay the engineers at Nissan would take issue at that.”
Claybrook: “Maybe they will. But look at the result. There are a lot of people who are blind. That’s a terrible result for a safety system.”
With more than 200,000 of these cars still on the road, we went to Nissan and asked if it planned on a recall.
Norma: “I don’t think anybody understands how emotional and intimate your sight is until it’s gone.”
Hansen: “How many injuries would it take for there to be a recall?”
Wheeler: “That’s not the issue.”
Malcolm Wheeler is a lawyer representing Nissan.
Hansen: “Twenty-five is not enough?”
Wheeler: “That’s not the issue.”
The issue, according to Wheeler, is whether or not there is something wrong with the design of the airbag, some defect that’s causing these injuries.
Wheeler: “It has been saving lives at a wonderful rate, it’s been preventing really terrible injuries like brain injuries and quadriplegia and paraplegia at a really wonderful rate.”
Not only that, Nissan says it’s run tests on the airbag and determined there is nothing unusual about the way it deploys.
Wheeler: “The fact that some people still incur injuries does not mean that there’s a defect in or a problem with the system.”
Remember that 1994 government videotape that seems to show the airbag punching the passenger in the face? Nissan says the bag was designed that way to protect small children by going over their heads.
In fact, Nissan sent Dateline videotape of 11 other vehicles’ passenger-side airbags that, just like the Altima, appear to hit the crash dummy in the face.
But there’s still the question of those 25 permanent eye injuries. Nissan says it’s sure other cars have just as many, but it can’t get access to other car manufacturers’ complaint files to prove it.
Wheeler: “Do I think that I would find other vehicles like this? The answer is yes, I do.”
Besides, Nissan says, many of the Altima’s serious eye injuries are nothing more than freak accidents. In eight of the 25 cases, Nissan thinks the airbag hurled an object, like a soda can or a ring into the passenger’s eyes. In seven other cases, Nissan believes the passenger was too close to the airbag when it deployed.
Take Norma Brainard’s case, for instance. Nissan says her shoulder harness slipped off just before her friend slammed on the brakes.
Wheeler: “When he hit those brakes so hard, from 60, 65 miles per hour, it pitched her forward all the way so that her forehead actually hit the instrument panel.”
A split second later, Nissan’s experts maintain, the airbag deployed at such close range that any airbag would have hurt her. They say the bump on the middle of her forehead proves that she hit the dashboard.
Wheeler: “That is not the kind of bump that could be caused by an airbag.”
And in another case in Alabama, Nissan claims it was Alicia Gibson’s bad luck, when her hand got caught between the airbag and her face, hitting her eye. The proof? Nissan says Alisia’s hand hit her face with such force it “fractured her wrist.”
Wheeler: “It’s just one of those unfortunate situations that you can’t prevent against with airbag technology. It just happens.”
So “Dateline” went back and checked with the women involved.
Norma says there was no way her shoulder harness came off and that her forehead never hit the dashboard.
Norma: “I don’t even see how that could happen.”
Norma’s experts say they’re sure the bump did come from the airbag, and that if she had been as close to the dashboard as Nissan has suggested she’d have suffered a whole different set of injuries.
And in the other case, Alisia Gibson says she’s sure her hand never hit her face. And she showed us medical records which proved she did not fracture her wrist, as Nissan told us. Instead, she says the airbag bruised her thumb. When we went back to Nissan, it changed its story, admitting its experts had only guessed Alisia’s wrist had been broken. But Nissan still insists her hand caused her injury.
Certainly, you can debate forever about the exact sequence of events in any given accident. So Nissan says it has a better way to tell if there a problem with the Altima by looking at the big picture, the statistics. Nissan says its analysis shows the Altima’s airbag is performing as well as or better than any other airbag in a comparable car.
Wheeler: “This is pure science, it’s mathematics.”
Nissan gave us the results of its research, 20 charts and graphs. And at first glance, the statistics seemed impressive. But then we looked more closely and discovered that the vast majority of the charts had nothing whatsoever to do with serious eye injuries, instead analyzing only Nissan’s fatality record.
Claybrook: “Fatal injuries are not relevant here because these are eye injuries. And so while they may have a safe vehicle as to death, they don’t have a safe vehicle as to injury.”
In fact, only one chart it gave us dealt with eye injuries.
The information for that chart came from a small collection of accident records kept by the government. Nissan’s lawyer told us that its search of the database found not one single eye injury to a passenger in a ’94 or early ’95 Altima.
Wheeler: “We think it’s one very significant data point. One very significant piece of information that tells us that there is not, in fact, a problem with this airbag system.”
But when we examined that collection of accident records we learned that it was just too small to conclude anything about a particular make or model car. And in fact when “Dateline” pressed Nissan, it admitted it could not “draw any proper statistical conclusion.”
Then the company directed us to two more sets of accident records that it said showed the ’94 and early 95 Altima posed no greater risk to eyes than any other comparable car.
The first was from the University of Michigan. But it examined accidents mostly from only one county, and its own statistician warned Nissan in an e-mail, “it’s not a representative sampling” and it contains “many biases.”
The second was from New York state. Nissan insists its analysis of the data is valid. But according to the state’s own data expert, the records are plagued with missing or incomplete information, making conclusions like Nissan’s statistically meaningless.
So is Nissan allowing a car with a dangerous airbag to remain on the road? We figured there would be at least one more way to check.
Remember, toward the end of 1995, Nissan started using a new and improved passenger-side airbag. Nissan insists that bag was already in the works before it ever heard of the allegations of eye injuries. But even Nissan admits the newer bag deploys quite differently.
Wheeler: “It still comes up, but it gets pulled down more quickly. It’s actually a different shape of an airbag.”
Look again at this 1995 government videotape. The new design appears rounder and fuller, not like the compressed punch of the old design. So we wanted to know: Was Nissan getting as many complaints of eye injuries with the newer airbag as it did with the older one?
Wheeler: “As best as we can tell, the rates are comparable.”
Hansen: “Comparable.”
Wheeler: “Right.”
Hansen: “Really? The rate of eye injury complaints stayed the same? So how many complaints were there about the redesigned airbag?”
Wheeler: “I believe there are six.”
Six? Listen to what happened when we pressed for details about those six injuries.
Hansen: “Are you aware of any cases where a passenger has claimed to have been legally blinded in one eye because of the airbag?”
Wheeler: “I don’t know the details of what those are. I mean, we can find that information out. I just don’t know what the details are.”
After our interview, Nissan sent us this letter saying any eye injuries associated with the redesigned bag “do not appear to be permanent.” And in a court filing, Nissan admits it has no evidence the redesigned airbag has blinded anyone.
So you might be wondering what government safety regulators are doing about all this. When we first called the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, we discovered it knew nothing about the 25 permanent eye injuries confirmed by “Dateline.”
But last year, after “Dateline” began investigating, the lawyer representing several of the passengers who were blinded or injured took his evidence to NHTSA, which is now deciding whether the ’94-’95 passenger-side airbag should be recalled.
As part of its investigation, the government required Nissan to reveal the number of face and eye injury complaints it’s had in the ’94 and early ’95 Altima and also some of its other cars.
Based on Dateline’s calculations, which were reviewed by an independent statistician, the rate of face and eye injury complaints in the ’94, early ’95 Altima is six times as great as the average of the other Nissan cars.
The government also required the makers of 15 other cars to report their complaints of eye and face injuries. The eye/face injury complaint rate for the ’94, early ’95 Altima is 18 times the average of the other cars.
Nissan insists its ’94, early ’95 Altima numbers are so much higher because of “substantial adverse publicity stirred up by the contingent-fee lawyer,” who Nissan says has targeted the car, an apparent reference to attorney Larry Baron, a charge Baron calls ridiculous. But the company says its confident it will be vindicated once government investigators review all the evidence.
Wheeler: “We’re going to provide them all the information we have. And we’re very comfortable that they will examine that data the way we examined that data. They will look at the rates, they will look at the literature and that they will find what we found.”
Although Nissan won an Altima airbag lawsuit overseas, in the United States, almost every case has settled before trial, with confidentiality agreements in which Nissan admits no blame. But the victims say they’re reminded every day of what happened to them and what could still happen to someone else.
Norma: “To this day I get sick to my stomach because they’re still out there.”

Lawrence Baron is a Portland air bag lawyer. The Norma Swanson (Brainerd) Nissan air bag injury suit was settled out of court on Oct. 23 after the trial had already started. She is back at work as a property manager in Beaverton and remains visually disabled.