Tyre Sampson: Teen died after amusement ride operator made physical alterations to harness
Tyre Sampson, a rising middle school football star from Missouri, died after falling from a towering Florida amusement ride. He was just 14 years old but was already 6 feet 5 inches tall and weighed well over 300 pounds. His family's lawyers want to know if negligence about his size, or other factors, had a part in his death.
On Saturday investigators continued to look into what happened on Thursday, March 22, when Sampson fell from a 430-foot free-fall attraction at ICON amusement park in Orlando, not far from Disney World. “This young man, he was athletic and he was big. He had no way of knowing,” said Bob Hilliard, a Texas lawyer who represents Tyre’s mother, Nekia Dodd, told WKYT. “This is going to be an issue of a lack of supervision and lack of training. A straight-up negligence case.”
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Tyre's cause of death
According to the investigation, the 14-year-old had a serious head, neck, and body injuries, as well as internal injuries, and died from blunt force trauma, according to an autopsy report. Months after his family filed a wrongful death case against Icon Park, the Slingshot Group, its connected firms, the manufacturers, and the contractors, the medical examiner's office deemed the teen's death an accident, reported The Sun
Tyre weighed 383 pounds and stood more than 6 feet tall, exceeding the ride's maximum rider weight restriction of 287 pounds. He fell through the space between the seat and the safety strap, according to a Florida Department of Agriculture investigation from April. The field investigation revealed that the ride operator made physical alterations to the attraction's harness, rendering it dangerous. "This report confirmed that manual adjustments had been made to the sensor [of] the seat in question that allowed the harness-to-restraint opening to be almost double that of the normal restraint opening range," Florida Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried said at the time.
The attraction lifts passengers to a height of 430 feet, tilts them so they face the earth for a brief while, and then nosedives at speeds of up to 75mph (121kph).
Tyre's father, Yarnell Sampson, said other attractions refused to let him on because he was too big, but Free Fall operators had allowed him to ride. “This particular ride decided ‘yeah, we can take you, get on,’ when nobody else would allow him to get on the rides.” The father also told media that Tyre began to panic when the Free Fall ride took off and knew his restraint bar was moving. “That's when he started freaking out. And he was explaining to his friends, next to him, 'I don't know man, if I don't make it down, safely, can you please tell my mamma and daddy that I love them...'". “For him to say something like that, he must have felt something.”
The 911 call made after Tyre's fall revealed how the theme park employees 'didn't secure the seatbelt'. "They didn't secure the seatbelt on him," an unidentified woman caller told the 911 operator. The woman also informed that no one was able to perform CPR on Tyre because they were unable to shift him to his back. "No, no, he's a heavy dude. He's on his stomach," the woman said.
Family shocked and heartbroken
Tyre's father Yarnell is represented by well-known civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who claimed the family is "shocked and heartbroken by the death of their son". “This young man was the kind of son everyone hopes for — an honor roll student, an aspiring athlete, and a kind-hearted person who cared about others,” Crump, who also specializes in catastrophic personal injury cases, said in a statement on Saturday.
The Orange County Sheriff's office and the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, which governs rides in the state's main amusement parks, declined to comment, saying the investigation was still ongoing.
Tyre's family claims he wanted to play professional football so he could buy his mother a house and raise everyone in the family to "a higher level". His stepmother, Wendy Wooten, told the St Louis Post-Dispatch, "That was his dream, and he was on his way. He had so many scouts looking at him. He was going to be a great football player.”
Tyre was part of a group called the St Louis Bad Boyz football club who were in Orlando for a weeklong training camp, the Post-Dispatch reported. The group had chaperones and, by all accounts, were doing what millions do every year during spring break in Orlando: enjoying the theme parks and rides.
He was a student at the City Garden Montessori School in St. Louis. The school sent a letter to parents saying counseling would be available for students. “Tyre has been a City Garden student for many years,” the school said in a statement from its principal and CEO. “We will miss him tremendously and our hearts go out to his family and friends during this extremely difficult time.”
No criminal charges have been filed, but negligence or wrongful death lawsuit, or both, seem likely. Crump said he “intended to get answers for Tyre’s grieving family".