ARLINGTON -- Witnesses described the horrifying final moments of Rosy Esparza's life and her death in the Arlington Police Department's official report on the July 19 accident, in which Esparza was thrown from the Texas Giant roller coaster at Six Flags Over Texas.
WFAA obtained 92 pages of documents from The Dallas Morning News detailing the report Thursday afternoon.
The Tarrant County Medical Examiner determined in July the 52-year-old woman was killed when she fell 75 feet and struck a support beam. According to the police report, Esparza's body was almost completely severed in half and came to rest against a wooden beam on top of a metal building.
Her body was discovered by a police officer who spotted her from an obsevation deck after she could not be found.
According to the report, a Six Flags employee told police that when he or she checked Esparza's restraint, they felt it was a little high or not as tight as it should be. The employee then went back to check the control panel, which has indicator lights that show when the restraints are not locked. The control panel said the restraint was secure.
The employee also told police that they had problems with that particular train - the red train - a few days before the accident. The sensors were not working properly, and they had maintenance come out and fix it.
Esparza was sitting in the third row of the roller coaster and was ejected as the ride began its descent from the first large hill of the track, county spokeswoman Linda Faye Anderson said after the accident.
According to the police report, the consensus of the witnesses was that Esparza came loose during the first descent of the ride.
Cody Rush spoke with WFAA from his home in Tulsa. He was on the same train with a friend and said they were within arm s reach of Rosy Esparza. He said Esparza was laughing and smiling when the ride started, and things took a horrible turn after the first major descent.
Esparza's daughter, Aracely Segovia, was also on ride and in the report said she began to hearing yelling after the first descent.
Then, when the train went over the second bump, witnesses believe Esparza was thrown forward violently and may have hit her head, as she slumped to the floor of the car afterward.
Segovia turned around on the second bump and saw her mother slumped over in the car. She described her mother as almost completely upside down with her head near the floor of the car and her feet almost straight up in the air.
Finally, witnesses said, as the ride neared the third ascent, Esparza was thrown from the car. Segovia said she saw her mother being tossed out of the car.
Joshua Fleak, 19, said he was sitting directly behind the victim and saw her ejected from the ride head-first.
When Rush saw Esparza roll out of the car, he got scared.
We were holding on to each other and praying, he said. That was the longest roller coaster ride of my life.
Several witnesses believed they heard a popping sound from Esparza's seat when the car came down on the descent.
An experienced ride operator said when the red train went by, he or she remembered thinking the restraint wasn't all the way down on Esparza's thigh, but the ride operator said they figured it would be OK due to the woman's size and because the restraint was far down enough to register on the control panel.
The same operator said there have been issues with the red train's control panel in the past, and that he or she had seen the trouble light on the Esparza's car three within the week before the accident. The operator also said once the train returned, he or she noticed the restraint was higher than when the train had been dispatched.
Several weeks after the accident, Arlington police received a video from a teenager who had been riding in car three the week before Esparza was killed.
The camera was in a storage pouch in front of the seat and showed two riders in the car. In the 16th second of the video, the report says police watching the footage heard a distinct pop sound and immediately after, the two riders are heard yelling for the operator to stop the ride.
While the video did not show if the restraint had moved, the report claims after the riders called out in the video, a loudspeaker on a ride announces, Car three unlocked, car three and four are now unlocked. Recheck car three, recheck car four.
Esparza's family filed a lawsuit against Six Flags in September, the same week the ride reopened.
The family's suit said after the mother's death, inspections showed that various parts of the security systems on the ride were experiencing inconsistencies and intermittent failures. It alleges that Six Flags admitted after the inspections they replaced a 'limit switch' for a restraint in a seat in the very car in which Rosa [Esparza] was riding because Six Flags found the switch to be defective.
The Esparza family's lawsuit, which accuses Six Flags of negligence, alleges that Six Flags has been reactive, not proactive in regard to safety systems and that caused Esparza's death. The Esparza family attorneys have requested a jury trial, and requested compensation of at least $1 million.
Six Flags has claimed it did not have any liability because they didn't design or build the cars used on the coaster, and said the Texas Giant got a green light to resume operations in September from the Texas Department of Insurance after extensive testing.
The Texas Giant re-opened in September after external and internal experts determined the coaster was safe to ride and that the accident was not caused by any mechanical failure, said Six Flags Over Texas President Steve Martindale in a statement released Thursday. We added incremental and overlapping safety measures to the ride including re-designed lap-bar restraint pads and seat belts. We also added a test seat at the ride-line entrance so guests can determine if they properly fit in the restraint system.
We continue to extend our deepest condolences to the Esparza family, Martindale said. This was a tragic accident that deeply affected our employees, especially since safety is our highest priority and at the heart of everything we do.
