14-year-old Tyre Sampson from St Louis, Missouri, met his untimely death after falling from a 430-foot tall ride at Florida Icon park, and in a new report by the Daily Mail, he was in a modified seat. According to investigators in Florida, “safety sensors on a ride at an Orlando theme park had been modified before a Missouri teenager fell to his death.”
DM has details of the findings;
Tyre Sampson, 14, from St. Louis, visited the ICON park with a friend and his family on March 24, and the group decided to ride the Free Fall, which had opened in December.
The ride sees 30 passengers rise up the world’s tallest free-standing drop tower, to a height of 430 feet. They then tilt forwards and plunge 400 feet at speeds reaching 75 mph.
On Monday a team of forensic engineers hired by the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services concluded that Sampson had slid out of the harness feet first, sliding over the seat horn that sat between his legs.
The gap between his harness and the top of the seat horn was 6-7 inches, they found. Other seats had a gap averaging 3.33 inches. State-of-the-art sensors monitoring the three-month-old ride would normally have alerted operators to the fact that the gap was abnormally large.
Sampson was 6ft 5 tall and 340lbs, his father Yarnell said. The ride’s operation manual said that the maximum weight of riders was 286lbs. The engineers did not address the question of whether Sampson should have been allowed to ride.
The investigators found that the ride ‘did not experience a mechanical or electrical failure.’
Poor kid didn’t deserve to die like this. Hopefully, the park takes some accountability and makes sure that their rides are safe, so something like this never happens again. Please pray for his family, I know they are struggling dealing with his death.
Flip to the next page for photos from the scene and how the seat had to be manually adjusted for him.
