[obliterate800]

Rest In Peace, big guy. You seemed like a good kid.

[RidetheLightning]

The Did you check it girl is pretty hot. I'd like to give her a full check.

[endobiont]

Originally Posted by thedetective ↗

He may have been to big for the ride :(

Gee…Ya think?? This picture says it ALL. We had a similar fall from a ride here in DFW a few years back. Too big for the seat and language barrier. The family still made out like the illegal banditos they were..

[Bugguts]

From what I’ve been reading about the whole situation:

A friend of someone on the ride who didn’t want to go recorded it instead, and just happened to capture the fall. He said he didn’t even immediately realize that someone had fallen, since his eyes were fixed on his friends.

I guess nobody ran right over because the people on the ground (including the workers) initially thought it was just a part from the ride that fell. Other onlookers who did realize a person fell were probably either in total shock, or didn’t want to involve themselves in the situation for fear of getting sued or something— which is a very real possibility, sadly.

Seconds before the ride started, the passengers were heard discussing issues with the seat restraints, wondering why there was no seatbelt that “clicked”, and questioning why a brand new ride like that didn’t have belts.

The Free Fall ride is brand new— it was built only a few months ago. The passenger seats only have a harness, with no belt connecting the horn on the seat to the shoulder restraint. Apparently belts are normally a part of the passenger restraint system on rides of this type. On the ride, passengers are also tilted forward, putting additional pressure on the safety harness as it drops.

A ride safety expert, Nathan MacDonald, said ride design normally doesn’t play a role in these accidents— they’re usually due to operator error. In general, ride operation employees aren’t trained to ensure safety measures are in place. This particular ride has an extremely complex design (including a high-tech permanent magnetic braking system), and ride employees at the (tiny) ICON Park were probably in over their heads when operating that thing.

About 30 seconds after the boy fell, ride employees were overheard in the video asking each other about the boy’s harness. “Did you check him?” one employee asked.
The other employees responded yes, they did check his harness, and the light was on (each seat has a light that indicates that the harness is correctly in place). The mechanics of the ride are set up so that if all passenger restraints aren’t locked, the ride won’t even operate.

Some of the onlookers who called 911 mentioned the victim was heavy (the boy was in fact 6’5” and 340 pounds). When one 911 operator mentioned to a caller that medics would perform CPR on him, the caller replied: “He’s about 300 pounds. He’s hard to lift."

The victim’s dad is wondering if his son should have been allowed on the ride at all, due to his size. According to the boy’s friends riding with him, he was “freaked out” when the ride first started, because he felt like something was wrong. Friends said that “When the ride took off, that’s when he was feeling uncomfortable. He was like ‘this thing is moving,’ you know what I’m saying? And he was like ‘what’s going on?’” The victim even asked his friend strapped in next to him to tell his parents he loved them in case “I don’t make it down”. From reading all this, it seems that his harness was wiggling or otherwise felt loose and unsecured to him. It’s a shame he didn’t shout something to the operators to stop the ride.

The poor kid didn’t just fall, he was thrown. Hard. The ride drops at 75 mph and then, because of the permanent magnetic braking system, comes to a smooth but very fast stop at the bottom of the drop, braking about 45 feet above the ground. So due to the follow-through of motion from the drop, the boy’s unsecured body was thrown to the ground with tremendous force. Remember that Newton’s first law of motion (law of inertia) states that an object in motion stays in motion, with the same speed and in the same direction, unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. Unfortunately the unbalanced force was the ground.

[pancrasefan]

Never understood the psychology behind going on a rollercoaster or any ride really. Why are people still doing this?

[Bugguts]

Originally Posted by chris ↗

Here is a picture of him on the ride. His sheer size is probably the issue here. Normally these locking arms need to fasten down three "clicks", I have a hard time imagining this was locked in the third position just looking at this angle.

Holy shit, you’d have to be a complete dumbass to see that harness isn’t on him correctly. He’s so big, there’s no way it could be clicked into proper position. I can’t believe that NOBODY but him noticed— I say this because the boy’s friends said he told them something felt wrong as soon as the ride started. He actually told his friends something like, “Tell my mom and dad that I love them if I don’t make it”. Poor kid should have yelled to the workers to get him off the damn thing if he was so frightened. Poor kid.

[nzcelt]

The parents are multi-millionaires now.

[Bugguts]

Originally Posted by reddlegion901 ↗

You could tell he wasn’t locked in, and the light on his seat was off at the top.

What lights do you speak of? I can’t see lights on any of the seats.

[M.F.D.B.]

Looks like morbid obesity is the Achilles heel of this restraint system...

[niknik]

Originally Posted by Hunter1031 ↗

Wow no one runs over. Fucking disgusting people these days.

I'm guessing it was probably obvious he was dead.