I went to bed last night after reading this and took hours to get to sleep. The image of a baby trapped in a head board just would not leave my head. Like other people I had assumed my DS would sleep in a crib/cot but it turned out he simply would not sleep that way so we ended up co sleeping and still are at 15m. I have had my worries about it (and still poke him in the night fairly frequently to make sure he is still breathing, poor thing!).
I agree with the poster who said about how the co-sleeping deaths seem worse because it is all about how the parent could have prevented the death and how the baby was smothered etc. The images are horrible. But I remember my aunt telling me how my poor cousin was when she found him dead from SIDS in his cot at 4m and believe me, the image is just as horrible.
We all take risks with our children every day. We put them to bed in cots in their own room before 6m, we co sleep with them, we take them for a drive in a car, we give them food they might be allergic to, we let them play on climbing frames, etc etc. We have to make up our own minds about what risks are acceptable to us. I would be very surprised if a baby in a car was not at more risk of dying in an accident than a co sleeping baby of smothering, and yet most people drive with their babies every day.
It comes back to the usual thing of try not to judge someone until you have been in their situation. We are all putting our children at risk all of the time and if we didn't they wouldn't grow up to be normal people.