Florida’s Orlando CNN — Nekia Dodd wished that no families would have to endure what she had last year as she watched construction workers take down the amusement park ride where her 14-year-old son perished in a horrifying fall. On March 24, Tyre Sampson died after falling from the Orlando FreeFall drop tower in ICON Park, which the ride’s operators claim is the largest freestanding drop tower in the world. Shortly after the ride’s roughly 400-foot descent started, the teenager was seen slipping out of his seat on bystander footage. Dodd told CNN on Wednesday that all he could do was “imagine, wonder, (is) imagine” what Tyre’s life may have been like.
Dodd, wearing a blouse featuring her son’s photo, strolled around the ride that killed her son. Now closed since that day, it is encircled by construction equipment and a chain link fence. “I wasn’t there when I lost my son,” Dodd remarked following her first Florida visit to an amusement park. “I wasn’t present for the final few words or breaths. To get a bit closer to him, I had to do something. He took his last everything on that ride.” “Tyre Sampson was not securely fastened.” Passengers sitting in individual seats were lifted into the air by the Orlando FreeFall. The gondola was then released in a free fall that would reach 4Gs when the seat had slanted forward 30 degrees.
The Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, which oversees amusement rides in the state, conducted an inquiry and found that the ride braked at a height of around 100 feet.
The ride’s weight restriction is 287 pounds, according to the tower’s owner’s manual. According to the postmortem report, Tyre weighed 383 pounds and stood just over 6 feet tall. The family claimed in a complaint that the ride site lacked scales and posted weight limitations. Quest Engineering & Failure Analysis Inc., a forensic engineering firm, was recruited by Florida government to look into the occurrence after the disaster. According to the firm’s inquiry, Tyre’s harness sensor in his seat had been “manually loosened, adjusted, and tightened,” creating a larger than usual space between his harness and his seat. The ride’s electronic safety features were not adequately met by the “mis-adjustment” of Tyre’s “harness proximity sensor.”
According to the firm’s analysis, this allowed for a larger than usual space between his harness and his seat. Tyre’s “harness proximity sensor mis-adjusted,” according to the study, “inappropriately satisfying the ride’s electronic safety mechanisms, causing both safety lights to illuminate and allowing the ride to commence even though the ride was unsafe.”
The state’s Bureau of Fair Rides investigation claims that attendants were misinformed about “weight requirements or proper loading procedures and were trained that if the indicator light on the seat illuminated, the patron was safe to ride.” Additionally, the report stated that the attendant inside the ring that day was a “trainee,” having just been employed for three days. The 14-year-old “slipped through the gap between the state report” during the journey. It came to the conclusion that Tyre Sampson’s improper seat belt fastening was “the cause of the accident.” According to the autopsy report, blunt force trauma was the cause of Tyre’s death. “Why didn’t they turn him away?” “Everything halted when I received the phone call. I was aware. Tyre’s mother remarked, “I knew.”