The designers of the 17-story waterslide called Verrückt, dubbed the “world’s tallest waterslide,” have been arrested and charged with murder after 10-year-old Caleb Schwab was decapitated while riding the slide at the Schlitterbahn water park in 2016.
According to the NPR, the ride’s two principal designers, Schlitterbahn co-owner Jeffrey Wayne Henry and John Timothy Schooley, were arrested on Monday and face 18 felony counts, including second-degree murder. 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.
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According to the grand jury 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.”
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,” the indictments allege.
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.
Schlitterbahn spokeswoman Winter Prosapio wrote in a statement that safety has always been the company’s top priority and that the design team had full confidence in the ride’s safety.
“The allegation that we operated, and failed to maintain, a ride that could foreseeably cause such a tragic accident is beyond the pale of speculation. Many of us, and our children and grandchildren, have ridden the ride with complete confidence as to its safety. Our operational mantra has been and will forever be Safety First,” the statement read.
