A man died Monday after being ejected from Goliath, the tallest roller coaster at Six Flags Over Georgia, prompting the park to temporarily shut down nine similar coasters across North America while police and state ride inspectors investigate.
Goliath features a 200-foot first drop and does not take riders upside down. The ride uses lap bars that pull down over a rider’s legs and waist rather than seat belts, according to The Associated Press.
Mark Lopez-Trigo, a Florida personal injury attorney and founding partner of Padron & Lopez-Trigo, said investigators will likely try to determine whether the death was an isolated event or signals a broader problem with the ride’s safety equipment, maintenance or inspection history.
“What led to this incident, whether it be isolated or system-wide? Was it a failure in the system itself?” Lopez-Trigo said.
He said investigators could scrutinize Goliath’s restraint system and whether required maintenance and inspections were carried out properly before the incident. “All that’s going to hopefully come out in the next couple days throughout the investigation,” he said, adding that the cause has not yet been determined and the probe remains in its early stages.
Six Flags’ decision to close nine similar coasters at six parks does not by itself prove a widespread safety problem, Lopez-Trigo said, but it could help focus the investigation. “It tells us where to focus theories of liability,” he said.
He said the closures also show how much is still unknown. “Six Flags’ decision to temporarily close nine other roller coasters across six parks tells you that the company itself does not yet know what caused this,” he said.
What comes next
Lopez-Trigo said cases involving alleged equipment failures often require looking well beyond the moments right before an accident. Speaking generally about cases his firm has handled, he said such incidents often come down to “some sort of trickle down effect where a certain system either wasn’t maintained properly or wasn’t inspected properly.”
For the victim’s family, potential legal options could include a wrongful-death claim filed through the victim’s estate, while any injured guests could pursue separate personal injury claims depending on the circumstances, he said. Though the legal rights and damages involved differ between those types of claims, he said the fact-finding process would likely look similar for all parties.
“While justice might mean different things to the different parties, the path to getting that justice is probably gonna look similar in terms of finding some of the answers as to how this happened,” Lopez-Trigo said.
He added that determining the cause matters not just for any civil claims but for figuring out whether safety changes are needed. “When we’ve dealt with cases like this in the past, it was always extremely important to find out what happened,” he said.
The investigation is ongoing, and authorities have not announced an official cause. Six Flags could not immediately be reached for comment.
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