Bungee jump blunder kills dad as his family watch on in horror
WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT Fabio Ezequiel de Moraes, 36, was killed in front of his shocked family when his leap from a bridge in Sao Paulo, Brazil, went horribly wrong
The grim accident was caught on camera
A father suffered terrifying final moments when his bungee jumping cord turned out to be too long and he crashed into the ground after a 43-metre jump while he family watched in horror.
Fabio Ezequiel de Moraes, 36, was killed as his family watched on from a bridge in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 2016.
The father-of-one lets out a last haunting, happy scream as he launched off a ledge and dived headfirst into the valley beneath.
However, the bungee team contracted by Moraes reportedly misjudged the length of rope needed for the descent, and the thrill-seeker struck the ground head first.
Moraes was rushed to hospital in Mairinique but subsequently died of the head trauma. His tragic final jump was witnessed by his wife, brother and six-year-old son.
Brazilian publication Diario reported Moraes had originally intended to complete the jump alongside his young son, but chose to go alone at the last moment.
Authorities launched an investigation into the fatality and confiscated the bungee equipment used by the team engaged by Moraes.
Just a month before Moraes tragic death the owner of a bungee jump attraction in South Korea was charged with negligence after a 29-year-old woman plummeted 43 metres into water when her cord snapped mid-air.
The woman sustained serious head and neck injuries but remarkably survived the fall.
In 2000 Matthew Coleman, 22, died while bungee jumping in the Swiss Alps after workers at Adventure World attached the wrong length cord tying him to a ski gondola more than 300 feet above the ground.
Matthew, an American, was the first in his group of seven to jump from the cable car. Footage of jump preparations shows the guides allegedly attaching the wrong bungee cord to Coleman, police have said.
Adventure World founder Georg Hoedle said his employees used a cord meant for jumps of about 600 feet, when Coleman’s plunge was closer to 330 feet.
The ropes were color-coded – red for longer jumps, green for shorter ones – as a precaution, Hoedle explained. The company’s bungee jump master, who had worked for Adventure World since 1994, attached the red cable to Coleman, said Hoedle.
“If you use the red, you are reminded that you have to be more cautious,” he said. “There is no explanation for it. They just made the mistake.”
Coleman, who stocked grocery stores for a Coca-Cola bottler in Frederick county, was on a 10-day European holiday with five friends, his relatives said.
Coleman’s parents flew to Switzerland to claim his body and an aunt and uncle said Coleman had called his mother just days before his death to wish her happy Mother’s Day and share his bungee jumping plans.
To their knowledge, he had never jumped before, and his mother was “not real excited” about it, said his aunt, Diane Bernoske of Damascus.
The sport “should be completely banned from this country and anywhere else,” said Coleman’s uncle, David Denu of Germantown. “There’s nobody who can say it’s safe. It makes me sick to my stomach that anyplace would think it’s safe. . . . It was my nephew, but it could’ve been somebody else’s nephew or son. He could’ve gone second. It could have been somebody else who went first.”
