A company is refusing to recall a popular bassinet that has strangled two children. Because of that, all the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) is tell parents to stop using the deadly Simplicity Bassinets.

According to the CPSC, Simplicity 3-in-1 and 4-in-1 convertible bassinets contain metal bars spaced farther apart than federal standards allow. Neither of the deadly beds are being recalled because SFCA Inc., the company which purchased all of Simplicity Inc.’s assets at public auction in April 2008, has refused to cooperate with the government and recall the products. According to the CPSC, SFCA maintains that it is not responsible for products previously manufactured by Simplicity Inc. SFCA acquired Simplicity when the company ran into financial difficulty following a crib recall that occurred last summer.

Last September, a Simplicity Winnie the Pooh 4-in-1 Bassinet claimed the life of a 4-month-old Missouri girl. The infant had slipped out the side of the bassinet between a lower horizontal railing and her mattress, and had become trapped in a 4-inch gap between the railing and top of the mattress. The little girl’s death was ruled an “accidental positional asphyxiation.”

The same bassinet has been blamed in the death of a six-month-old child in Kansas last Thursday. Again, the little girl slipped between the mattress and the side railing after the mattress came loose from the frame

The CPSC is already facing criticism following today’s Simplicity Bassinet warning. Commission spokeswoman Julie Vallese told the Chicago Tribune that the CPSC did not recall the bassinet last fall because “the investigation of a baby’s death in October 2007 remains open because there are still questions surrounding the circumstances of that baby’s death.”

But the coroner who investigated that baby’s death told the Tribune that is not true. “It was clear-cut,” McDonald County Coroner B.J. Goodwin III said. “We all felt it was the crib that caused the passing.”