The designer of the 17-story waterslide called Verrückt, on which 10-year-old Caleb Schwab was killed in 2016, was arrested at a Texas airport on charges of second-degree murder.
John Timothy Schooley, 72, one of the principal designers of the Schlitterbahn water park slide, was detained in Dallas, Texas after arriving on a flight from China, the U.S. Marshals Service said according to the BBC.
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Schooley, along with Schlitterbahn co-owner Jeffrey Wayne Henry, were indicted on 18 felony counts in March, including second-degree murder, aggravated battery, and aggravated endangerment of a child. The Kansas City park’s director of operations, Tyler Austin Miles, had earlier been indicted on 20 felony counts, including involuntary manslaughter, aggravated battery, and reckless endangerment of a child.
Schooley is currently being held without bond and awaiting extradition to Kansas.
The 17-story waterslide made its public debut in 2014, just 20 months after its 2012 conception, and immediately began racking up injuries. While it was open to the public, the ride led to 13 injuries, including two concussions and one instance in which a teenage rider went temporarily blind.
“Verrückt suffered from a long list of dangerous design flaws; however, the most obvious and potentially lethal flaw was that Verrückt’s design guaranteed that rafts would occasionally go airborne in a manner that could severely injure or kill the occupants,” grand jury indictments allege.
According to the indictments that detail the operation, Verrückt — German for “insane” — was made “in a spur-of-the-moment bid to impress producers of the Travel Channel’s Xtreme Waterparks series,” and that Schooley “possessed any kind of technical or engineering credential relevant to amusement ride design or safety.”
In 2016, the ride’s tendency to send riders air born led to the death of 10-year-old Caleb Schwab, son of Kansas state representative Scott Schwab.
While riding the waterslide with two adult women, the raft they were on flew into the waterslide’s overhead metal loops and netting, decapitating the 10-year-old and severely injuring the two women.
Following Schwab’s death, the waterpark closed the ride and made plans to demolish it, though the attorney general said that it had to remain standing during the investigation.
