A Garfield County jury last week awarded a record-breaking $205 million to the family of a 6-year-old girl who died on an amusement park ride at Glenwood Caverns Adventure Park in September 2021.
The family argued the operator of the Haunted Mine Drop did not properly secure Wongel Estifanos into her seat on the Haunted Mine Drop ride, which dropped more than 100 feet. The jury agreed with the girl’s family in their wrongful death lawsuit, awarding the family $205 million, including $123 million in punitive damages. The owner of the amusement park last week issued a statement saying the size of the Estifanos verdict places the park’s future “at serious risk” and blamed the accident on engineering and risk analysis failures by the manufacturer of the Haunted Mine Drop. The Estifanos family sued even though the claims of a woman injured at the park several years earlier were dismissed by a judge who cited a liability waiver signed by the woman before she accessed the park’s alpine slide.
The Estifanos award is the latest court case in Colorado that erodes the once unequivocal defense provided by liability waivers. Recent court decisions and jury awards have weakened the ubiquitous waivers used today by nearly all recreation providers. The recreation industry is warning that increased jury awards and lawsuits could threaten a growing industry as insurance providers balk at providing policies.
Earlier this month the Colorado Supreme Court announced it would hear the case of snowboarder injured in a collision with a snowmobile at Breckenridge ski area, marking the first case the high court will weigh since its industry-shaking 2024 ruling that ski resorts are not automatically immune from lawsuits because a skier signed a liability waiver.
And other injury lawsuits — including a negligence claim filed by the parents of a 7-year-old boy who was in a Purgatory ski area ski school class when he fell from a chairlift in March — are lining up after that historic Supreme Court decision and an equally unprecedented jury award against Vail Resorts earlier this month.
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