KANSAS CITY, Mo. _ A prosecutor on Tuesday accused two Schlitterbahn maintenance workers of deliberately misleading investigators to cover up poor maintenance of the Verruckt water slide where Caleb Schwab died in 2016.
Defense attorneys for David Hughes and John Zalsman countered that the Kansas Attorney General's Office misunderstood how the Kansas City, Kan., slide functioned and would be unable to prove that their clients lied to obstruct an investigation.
Attorneys for Hughes and Zalsman and the attorney general gave opening statements Tuesday in Wyandotte County District Court in the first criminal trial in the death of 10-year-old Caleb on what had been the world's tallest water slide.
Caleb was on a raft with two women on Aug. 7, 2016, when his raft went airborne and he collided with a metal pole that supported a netting system.
Adam Zentner, assistant Kansas attorney general, said Hughes and Zalsman neglected to replace a rubber brake mat meant to slow the raft down before the hump, which he said had fallen off the slide two weeks before Caleb's death.
Zentner said investigators spotted a square-shaped patch of glue residue on a section of Verruckt, signifying where the brake mat had been located. Zentner said when Hughes and Zalsman were asked about the brake pad, they said it had only been used for testing purposes.
Zentner told jurors that YouTube videos from other riders and an interview with another Schlitterbahn maintenance worker indicated that Hughes' and Zalsman's statements were not true, that the brake pad had been on the slide during the 2016 season.
"When we get down to it, why would David Hughes and John Zalsman have made a false statement about the brake mat to law enforcement?" Zentner told jurors. "Law enforcement was not trying to pin these guys for that crime. They were trying to get an answer: Was it a maintenance issue? If it wasn't a maintenance issue, they have to find some other reason why a child died on this ride."
Zentner said the defendants had a motive to mislead investigators.
"They knew they had screwed up," Zentner said. "The brake falls off and two weeks later, a child died horrifically on the slide. Yeah, there's motivation there to maybe misdirect things."
Attorneys for Zalsman and Hughes pushed back on Zentner's accusations, saying that investigators didn't seek to interview the maintenance workers until a year after Caleb died and that both men spoke with Kansas Bureau of Investigation agents willingly and without attorneys. They gave them information to the best of their recollection, attorneys said.
Scott Toth, the attorney for lead Schlitterbahn maintenance worker Hughes, said neither of them received reports about the brake mats needing repairs.
"What they're not going to be able to show is whether that report ever came to Mr. Hughes or Mr. Zalsman because it didn't," Toth told jurors. "If you don't prove that part of it, the whole rest of the house of cards will come tumbling down."
Dionne Scherff, attorney for Zalsman, said her client spoke with investigators at an International House of Pancakes restaurant without attorneys, indicating that he had nothing to hide.
She said the state's case hinges on one statement by Zalsman during that interview.
"When asked about this mat, Mr. Zalsman says, 'I'm not sure, to be honest with you, I don't recall us using one there but my memory isn't the greatest,'" Scherff said. "He told them what he knew, he told them what he remembered."
The trial continued with testimony from Kansas City, Kan., Police Department detective Jason Sutton, who investigated Caleb's death from the date it happened to when he handed the case off to the Wyandotte County District Attorney's Office in December 2016.
Sutton said a key piece of evidence was a video shot by Olathe Mayor Michael Copeland, who was at the bottom of the Verruckt filming riders in anticipation of his wife coming down the ride. Copeland caught Caleb's death on video, which was not shown to jurors.
Sutton described how the video captured Caleb being ejected from the raft upon colliding into the overhead pole. Sutton said water blasters were meant to help the rafts ascend the second hill, and that from the video it appeared that Caleb's raft arrived ahead of the flow of water from the jets.
"In Caleb's incident, the raft is way ahead of the water jet, which tells me this raft got from point A to point B faster than others did," Sutton said.
On cross-examination, Sutton was asked whether he gave his report to the Wyandotte County District Attorney with a recommendation that no charges be filed. Sutton said that wasn't the case, adding that the KBI and the Kansas attorney general got involved in the case after he handed it off to the local district attorney.
A grand jury in March and April indicted Schlitterbahn co-owner Jeff Henry and lead Verruckt designer John Schooley with second-degree murder and other felony charges, alleging that they lacked expertise in designing a slide like Verruckt and ignored warnings that the ride posed safety dangers.
Tyler Miles, director of operations at the Schlitterbahn park in KCK, was also indicted for involuntary manslaughter, as well as charges related to accusations that he covered up evidence that Verruckt was not properly maintained.
Henry, Schooley and Miles have pleaded not guilty and deny wrongdoing. They are not expected to go to trial until next year.
