MUKILTEO - A local woman says her daughter was nearly strangled to death by a sunroof and now she wants to alert other parents to the potential danger.

The accident happened this week while 5-year-old Aungelina Aarskog was resting in her mom's BMW. The sunroof window slammed shut on her neck while her head was sticking out.

"I almost lost her, she's my ... my baby, my pumpkin pie," says Aungelina's mom, Cyrena Aarskog.

Aarskog said it happened because of a feature on the car - turning the key in the driver side door will automatically shut all the windows, even when the engine is turned off.

Aarskog was in a friend's front yard, getting ready to leave and her daughter went ahead to the car. No one noticed the friend's son grab her car key and put it in the door.

"At this point I hear strained breathing," Aarskog says, and she saw her daughter's neck trapped in the closed sunroof.

She pulled on the window, but it wouldn't open. Then, on the second try, it came open.

Tiny broken blood vessels showed up on Aungelina's neck and around her eyes. She was rushed to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle.

The little girl got out of the hospital Thursday, and is going to be just fine. But Aungelina's mom worries it could happen again - to some other child.

"My rule - I don't care if they're 16 years old," she says, "stay out of the car."

She later discovered the same scary accident has happened to other kids.

There's even a group, kidsandcars.org, lobbying Congress to require car manufacturers to make all powered windows automatically reversible. That way, if a child gets caught, the window and the child will automatically bounce back.

The founder of kidsandcars.org says most people don't realize the force exerted by a power window, which uses 40 to 80 pounds of pressure. So she made a video showing how a power window can slice a cucumber and other vegetables in half.

Kidsandcars.org says that, unlike the United States, 80 percent to 90 percent of all cars have automatically reversible windows in Europe.