Teen who plummeted to death from Orlando drop-tower ride fell from seat at halfway mark: report
The teen who died after plummeting from a 430-foot-tall drop-tower in Orlando slipped from his seat about midway down, a law enforcement report released Tuesday revealed.
Tyre Sampson died on March 24 at age 14 when he fell from ICON Park’s new FreeFall drop tower ride in Orlando’s tourism district. The youth had been visiting central Florida from his home in Missouri with a friend’s family. The ride has been closed since.
The contraption lifts riders to the top, tilts the seats forward 30 degrees to point passengers toward the ground, and then free-falls nearly 430 feet at up to 75 mph, slowing before the end via a series of magnets. Tyre fell as the magnets engaged, according to a report at the time from the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Service.
Further evidence showed that a ride operator had adjusted sensors on Tyre’s seat manually before the ride took off, according to a subsequent forensic investigation. This made the ride’s sensors give a false safety indicator, even though the teen was not properly secured.
Moreover, the weight limit for the ride was 286 pounds. Tyre was upwards of 6 feet tall and weighed more than 300 pounds.
The teen appeared to slip from his seat when the free-falling passengers passed a yellow reflective tape halfway down the tower, The Associated Press reported, citing the father of one of Tyre’s friends. He appeared to be breathing when he hit the ground after falling 100 feet from the ride, but he was unresponsive, the father, Leon Howard, told deputies.
The Orange County Sheriff’s Office also released 911 calls from that day, and they indicated that dispatchers asked witnesses if they could perform CPR on the boy, AP reported. Just as the dispatcher asked one man to get help moving Tyre onto his back, deputies arrived.
Tyre’s family is suing Eagle Drop Slingshot LLC, which owns the FreeFall tower drop ride, and ICON Park. The wrongful death lawsuit filed last month by his parents, Yarnell Sampson and Nekia Dodd, accuses the defendants of negligence.
“From the ride and seat manufacturers and the installer to the owners and operators, the defendants had more than enough chances to enact safeguards, such as seatbelts, that could have prevented Tyre’s death,” civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who is representing the family, said when the suit was filed April 25. “They didn’t, and their poor decisions resulted in deadly consequences for a promising young man and lifelong pain for his family. We will hold these defendants accountable for their failures so that a tragedy like this never has to happen again.”
With News Wire Services
