By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
Published: May 4, 2004

HOUSTON, May 3 — Deborah Seliner says she does not remember the accident, just one moment when she was driving her used 1997 Ford pickup along Highway 6 near College Station and the next moment when she was in the dark carrying on a conversation with someone she decided was God. She was begging him, "God, please, if that is you, let me live for my babies."

Her truck, she found later, had blown a rear tire, sending her off the road onto a grassy divider. The truck rolled over, ejecting her, even though she had apparently been wearing a seat belt, through the open driver's side door and hurling her 20 yards onto the pavement.

She got her wish: she lived but is paralyzed from the midchest down and must use a wheelchair.

Now, two and a half years later, Ms. Seliner, 36, a single mother living near Texas A&M and struggling to care for her son, Tristen, 4, and daughter, Lilly, 3, has become a central figure in new safety cases involving Ford. This time the issue is not Firestone tires but door latches, specifically springs with the wrong specifications that some experts say cause doors to fly open during the extreme pressures of accidents.

Jeff Wigington, a lawyer in Corpus Christi who represents Ms. Seliner, said he has four other cases — two more in Texas, one in Idaho and another in Alabama — all involving deaths. "The initial indication is that it's the bad spring," Mr. Wigington said. "There's nothing else to explain why doors are opening."

Ford, in a response on Monday, said the latches "are safe and fully comply with all applicable government and industry standards." But in recent weeks it has settled for undisclosed sums Ms. Seliner's lawsuit and a sixth case, in Zapata in the Rio Grande Valley, involving two men killed in a crash last year.

Internal company records produced in response to the lawsuits showed that Ford had ordered and installed substandard door handle springs on up to 4.1 million F-Series trucks and Expedition and Lincoln Navigator S.U.V.'s from the model years 1997 to 2000, but decided against ordering a recall or reporting it to the federal government. The springs have been cited in at least six liability lawsuits involving deaths and serious injuries, lawyers say.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said through a spokesman, Rae Tyson, "It has been brought to our attention."

But Mr. Tyson added, "I can't say what we're going to do."

Joan Claybrook, president of the advocacy group Public Citizen and a former administrator of the safety agency, said, "It appears to me to be a safety defect that they were required to report to N.H.T.S.A."

According to Ford documents that emerged in the Seliner lawsuit and others, the issue goes back to 1997 when Transport Canada, the Canadian vehicle safety agency, informed Ford that a 20-mile-an-hour impact test on a Ford F-150 pickup produced an unexpected result: "During the impact, the passenger's door was flung open."

Ferdinand Trauttmansdorff, the Canadian engineer who notified Ford, recalled in a recent telephone interview from Ottawa that he sent Ford officials a videotape and digital photographs of the result.

By 2000, when Ford was under fire for not reporting crashes linked to Firestone tires, Ford engineers looking into the door-openings found "six occurrences at various speeds and test modes" and discussed them in the Critical Concerns Review Group, company records show.

A draft memorandum dated March 6, 2000, and bearing the name of a Ford engineer, B. B. Malhotra, reported that up to 6 million door handles "do not meet compliance" and noted that "in case of vehicle accident, the door may open."

In a draft memorandum from March 21, 2000, Ford traced the problem to door spring assemblies from its supplier, the Donnelly Corporation. By what was called "an error in translation," the mechanism had a torque — the force necessary to rotate an object — of 185 newtons a millimeter instead of 360, the draft memorandum said.

The memorandum recommended a recall, noting that the problem was "100 percent" attributable to the single component. But instead, it said, "inventories of springs at Donnelly were bent before installing them in the handles to increase installed handle torque above 360Nmm," or newtons per millimeter.

Permanent corrective action, it said, would involve "a redesign of the outside door handle spring."

Yet two years later, on March 25, 2002, another Ford memorandum said no defects had been found and that "it is Body Engineering's recommendation that this issue be closed."

Denying any violation of federal standards that require doors to withstand a force of 30 times gravity, a Ford spokeswoman, Kathleen Volkes, said Monday that "the documentation highlighted by plaintiffs' attorneys, who make a living by suing companies like Ford, is being misconstrued."

Ms. Volkes said Ford latches complied with an alternative method for measuring vehicle compliance: a brief impact test called "approved crash pulse."

But Mr. Wigington, the lawyer, said the safety agency declined to recognize that test as far back as 1975. "They set up a test they could not fail," he said.

For Ms. Seliner, it does not make much difference. All she knows, she said, is that toward midnight on Sept, 20, 2001, she was behind the wheel of her Ford pickup on her way to her job, a nightly run of delivering milk in an 18-wheeler.

She had no one's idea of an enviable life, she said: she was separated from an unsupportive husband and living fearfully with the father of her two babies, a man 23 years older than her who she said had threatened to kill her several times. Her father was dying of cancer.

That night, she said, she debated whether to stop at the house and pick up Tristen because he liked to ride with her. But she decided to let him sleep. She remembers cinching her seat belt, and an expert testified later that it seemed she had. She was passing a car when the tire blew.

With her settlement from Ford, which she is not permitted to quantify, she said she hoped to secure lifetime care for herself, Tristen and Lilly. The youngsters are being brought up by a neighbor. Otherwise, Ms. Seliner said social workers told her, they would have to place the children in foster homes.

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