Florida lawmakers will pass a bill honoring a teenager who died after falling out of an amusement park ride earlier in the year. Hundreds gathered at the site of his demise on his birthday to celebrate his life and to hear about the legislation aimed to improve entertainment ride safety at venues across the state.
On Wednesday, Aug. 17, State Rep. Geraldine Thompson announced she would be introducing the “Tyre Sampson Law,” a piece bearing the name of the eighth-grade boy who fell from the Orlando FreeFall ride on March 24, at the next legislative session. The news was delivered on what would have been his 15th birthday, FOX 35 News reports.
Standing with Thompson was Tyre’s father, other relatives and civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump.
Sampson lost his life while traveling with friends from St. Louis, Missouri, to Orlando, Florida, during his spring break. The parents of the young man, who an investigation proved was too big to get on the experience and slipped out because the seat harness had been tampered with, want the ride demolished.
ICON Park has indefinitely closed the FreeFall ride, an amusement feature dubbed “the world’s tallest freestanding drop tower.”
Thompson told those gathered that her proposal puts in place preventative measures to stop park operators from modifying rides, changes that could cost others their lives.
“The things that happened here were out of the ordinary,” the state congresswoman said. “Seats being adjusted after inspection after a permit – that was out of the ordinary.”
She continued, “It was out of the ordinary that the young people who were operating the ride had not been properly trained, that was out of the ordinary. It was out of the ordinary that the signs with regard to height and weight requirements were not posted so that Tyre could make his own decision – that was out of the ordinary.”
Thompson pointed to how young he was, saying, “In the ordinary course of life, you don’t expect parents to have to bury their children. He was on the cusp of manhood.”
The family gathered at the site of his death with balloons and broken hearts to celebrate the day he was born.
“It’s hard to explain something like this, it’s unnatural,” Yarnell Sampson, the teen’s daddy said, according to the Orlando Sentinel. “I didn’t want to come up here and try to be a public figure, try to get publicity behind this thing, but since I’m here, I’m going to let the message be heard: Justice for Tyre.”
“I’m trying to give the proper respect to the dead. He deserved that because he didn’t sign up to die. He signed up to ride a ride and have fun and it led up to something else,” he continued.
Overwhelmed with emotion and occasionally breaking down, the father also shared how devastating Tyre’s death was for him, sharing, “That was my only child. That was my everything.
“When he was born, he was a star to me,” Sampson said. “He always will be a star.”
The family filed a lawsuit regarding Tyre’s wrongful death. Crump asked the public “the courts and everybody involved” to expedite the trial against the park and those connected to the ride’s construction, management and operation.
“This [the complaint] is of great public importance,” the attorney said. “Safety is paramount.”
The bill has received little pushback with The Slingshot Group, the company that owns the ride Sampson fell from, saying through a legal representative Trevor Arnold that too support the proposed bill, saying, “Tyre’s death “a tragic accident that we take very seriously.”
He added, “We continue to cooperate with all inquiries, and it is our hope that one way Tyre’s name and memory can live on is through the proposed ‘Tyre Sampson Bill,’ which we support,” Arnold said.
If the bill passes in both of the state’s legislative bodies and is signed by the governor, it will be implemented as law on July 1, 2023.
