KANSAS CITY, Mo. _ A Schlitterbahn executive has been arrested and charged with involuntary manslaughter in connection with the 2016 death of Caleb Schwab on the Verruckt water slide.
The Wyandotte County Sheriff's Office booking log shows that Tyler Austin Miles, who is listed as an operations director for Schlitterbahn, was booked into the county jail Friday morning. He is being held on a $50,000 bond.
It's the first criminal charges to be filed in connection with Schwab's death on what had been billed as the world's largest water slide in 2016.
Schwab, the son of Kansas Rep. Scott Schwab, died on the afternoon of Aug. 7, 2016, when he and two other women took a ride on the towering water slide, billed as the largest such attraction in the world.
Schwab went to Schlitterbahn Vacation Village near the Legends in western Kansas City, Kan., on a day when the water park was admitting elected officials and their families for free.
Schwab took the front position on the raft with two women seated behind him.
The three would take a ride that thousands had taken before them without serious consequence.
The 17-story ride had been the subject of worldwide hype ahead of its opening in 2014. Verruckt was a major new attraction to a water park, Schlitterbahn's first outside of Texas, that had experienced mixed results since it opened in 2005. The ride carried passengers on a raft cruised along atop a thin film of water. Riders would plunge down a 168-foot steep initial descent, before coming up an elongated hump before coming to rest in a pool of water.
Helping build the Verruckt hype to thrill-seekers were videos that emerged from the testing phase prior to the slide opening to the public. They depicted rafts careening out of the top of the chute.
Schwab died of what Police termed a "fatal neck injury." An autopsy revealed that Schwab was decapitated when the raft that carried passengers on Verruckt went airborne and struck a metal pole that supported a netting system that had been installed to keep riders from flying off the slide.
Schlitterbahn closed the park for two days. The company decided to decommission Verruckt, the ride remained standing due to a court order that prevented its destruction as law enforcement continued to investigate the circumstances that led to Schwab's death.
Schwab, one of four sons born to Scott and Michele Schwab, was a young baseball enthusiast. At his funeral, Scott Schwab recalled when his son, 5 years old at the time, comforted him after a job loss.
"Our goal is to get to a place where we think of Caleb and feel joy and not sorrow," Scott Schwab said at his son's funeral. "We have lost our joy, but we will get it back."
For the year-and-a-half that followed Schwab's death, Schlitterbahn and authorities investigating the incident have remained tight-lipped about what happened and revealed few clues about the investigation.
A Star investigation determined that the design of the slide had serious flaws, that Schlitterbahn and others involved in designing the ride encountered few, if any, questions from local or state government officials about the safety of the ride and that Kansas lacked regulations on water slides that would evaluate whether an attraction like Verruckt put the public's safety at risk.
The Star contacted amusement and water park experts who questioned the physics and mechanics of Verruckt. They scrutinized the wisdom of designing a ride that mimicked a roller coaster but, unlike a roller coaster, didn't ensure that the raft was attached to the ride itself. The netting system, propped up by metal poles that encircled the chute, was also a dangerous flaw in Verruckt's design, those experts said.
Others who had been on Verruckt reported instances in which their raft had gone airborne, as well. Riders also said that Velcro-like harnesses to keep passengers in the raft did not function properly.
Two adult women who took the ride with Schwab suffered serious injuries. Hannah Barnes and Matraca Baetz settled claims against Schlitterbahn for undisclosed terms.
Schwab's family also settled with Schlitterbahn; an affiliated general contractor called Henry & Sons Construction; the raft manufacturer Zebec USA and a consultant named John Hunsucker for a combined $19.7 million.
In response to Schwab's death and the realization that few regulations governed amusement park safety, the Kansas Legislature took up a bill that would require more oversight of water parks and tougher penalties for safety violations.
New provisions _ daily inspections and daily fines for each day a violation exists _ were meant to replace lax oversight that existed at the time Schwab died. Scott Schwab, often a critic of burdensome regulation, supported the measure along with his House colleagues.
Gov. Sam Brownback signed the measure into law in April 2017, but faced delays in implementation as concerns about whether carnival and amusement park operators were ready to handle the law's new requirements surfaced last year.
Meanwhile, Schlitterbahn re-opened the location for the 2017 season, although it held back on advertising in the Kansas City area and continued to wait for permission to tear Verruckt down.
