Chilling details have emerged about how a ten-year-old boy was decapitated while riding the "world's tallest" waterslide.
Caleb Schwab, 10, was enjoying a family outing to Schlitterbahn Water Park in Kansas City on Elected Officials Day, where Kansas lawmakers and their families received free admission.
The boy had been separated from his older brother, Nathan, because their combined weight didn’t meet the minimum requirement for riding together. Nathan went first, riding with two adult strangers. Schwab followed in a separate raft.
“He flew from the Verrückt, he flew from the Verrückt,” Nathan reportedly cried out, cited by Daily Mail. Schwab's mother, Michelle, was blocked from getting too close to the scene. “Trust me, you don't want to go any further,” a man told her.
The result of the collision decapitated the young boy, ending his life instantly. His body was floating at the bottom of the slide in the pool when staff ran over to attend to him.
The employees immediately called emergency services and cordoned off the area to avoid other park-goers from seeing the horrific scene.
At the time, the park released a statement addressing the tragedy, writing: "In our 50 years of providing an environment for families and friends to gather, we've never experienced this kind of devastating event. The safety of our staff and our guests is our top priority," per ABC News.
The incident, which occurred on August 7, 2016, triggered national outrage and intense scrutiny over the slide’s construction and safety standards.
The ride, which means "insane" in German, had been touted as the tallest in the world, plunging rafts at a staggering 70 miles per hour down a 168-foot vertical drop, higher than Niagara Falls.
An investigation exposed alarming flaws in the ride’s creation. Inventor Jeff Henry and designer John Schooley were determined to feature the slide on the Travel Channel’s Xtreme Waterparks show.
During early testing, Henry declared, “That was the best ride I’ve ever been on,” to which Schooley responded, “We really didn’t know if we were going to survive it or not.”
Shockingly, neither man held any formal engineering credentials. According to court documents, the slide’s development relied on “crude trial-and-error methods,” using sandbags instead of proper safety testing. The netting, which had been added to catch airborne rafts, ultimately became a deadly design flaw.
In the six months leading up to Schwab’s death, at least thirteen riders had been injured on the slide, some suffering concussions, while a 15-year-old girl experienced temporary blindness.
Despite charges of second-degree murder, aggravated battery, and child endangerment, the case against Henry, Schooley, and other Schlitterbahn employees fell apart in 2019 after "improper evidence and testimony" was displayed to the grand jury.
In addition to this, a judge also ruled that the grand jury had been improperly shown dramatized reality TV footage.
However, the late boy's family was awarded nearly $20 million in settlements from the companies involved, per court documents. As reported by the Kansas City Star, SVV 1 and KC Water Park would pay out $14 million, while two other parties would be contributing undisclosed amounts to the family in order to settle the lawsuit filed against them.
Scott Schwab, the little boy's father and a Kansas state representative, described his son as “my joy.” At his funeral, he said, “We’ve lost some joy. We’ve lost Caleb, my joy. But we’ll get it back.”
The Verrückt was demolished after the investigation, and the park was permanently closed in 2018.
In 2019, The Atlantic released a short documentary titled The World’s Tallest Water Slide Was a Terrible, Tragic Idea.
Directed by filmmaker Nathan Truesdell, the film examined the fatal accident and the culture of negligence that led to it. Truesdell explained, “There wasn't a lot of science or ride engineering involved... They were sending sandbags down and basically hoping they didn’t fly off".