Sampson Family Awarded $310 Million Over Teen's Fatal Fall From the Orlando FreeFall Ride, in a Trial the Austrian Manufacturer Never Showed Up to Contest

On March 24, 2022, a 14-year-old football standout from the St. Louis area was visiting Orlando's ICON Park entertainment district on spring break. He boarded the Orlando FreeFall, a 430-foot drop tower billed as the tallest of its kind in the world. He stood 6 feet 5 inches and weighed more than 380 pounds, roughly 100 pounds over the ride's posted limit, but no one stopped him from taking a seat. As the gondola plunged and began to brake, he slipped out from under his harness and fell to the pavement below. He did not survive.

The investigation that followed found the failure was not a fluke. A forensic engineering report commissioned by the state concluded that sensors on his seat had been manually adjusted to accommodate larger riders, nearly doubling the size of the harness opening, and the ride had no seat belts as a backup restraint. His parents, Nekia Dodd and Yarnell Sampson, sued the ride's owner, its operator, and its Austrian manufacturer, Funtime Handels GmbH, in Orange County circuit court. In 2023 the family settled with ICON Park and the ride's operating company on undisclosed terms, the ride was permanently dismantled, and Florida lawmakers unanimously passed the Tyre Sampson Act, signed in May 2023, tightening safety standards for large amusement rides statewide.

That left the manufacturer. Funtime, the company that designed and built the tower, never engaged with the American case: when the wrongful death claim against it finally reached trial in December 2024, the company had no attorney listed in the court records and sent no representative to the courtroom. The trial went forward anyway. Kimberly Wald of The Haggard Law Firm, who represented the boy's mother, told jurors the company had built the tallest, most dangerous tower and had not installed a ten dollar seat belt. She tried the case alongside the firm's managing partner Michael Haggard and co-counsel Ben Crump and Hilliard Law, presenting the engineering evidence of the misadjusted sensors to a jury that heard no defense at all.

On December 5, 2024, after deliberating for about an hour, the jury returned a $310 million verdict, $155 million to each parent.

The honest caveat is built into the way the trial unfolded. This was an uncontested verdict against a defendant that ignored the proceedings, and turning it into money means enforcing a Florida judgment against a private company in Austria, a long and uncertain road. The family's actual compensation to date has come from the earlier confidential settlements with the ride's owner and operator. What the verdict adds is a jury's formal answer, on the public record, to the question the settlements left open: a finding that the manufacturer's own choices, a tower with altered sensors and no seat belts, cost a 14-year-old his life.