Lodi Parachute Center ordered to pay $40M in 2016 death

A Merced County family whose 18-year-old son died in a 2016 skydiving accident in Lodi was awarded $40 million by a San Joaquin County judge Wednesday.

Paul Van Der Walde, the Campbell-based attorney who represented the family of Tyler Turner in the lawsuit, told the Fresno Bee on Wednesday that the judgment was significant not only because of the amount that Lodi Parachute Center Bill Dause will be required to pay, but because it specifically targets him.

“We are hoping this will allow us to get this place closed or be sold to a responsible owner who can operate it safely,” Van Der Walde said.

The Turner family sued the parachute center, Dause and Skydivers Guild, Inc. on the grounds of negligence in Tyler Turner’s death in 2016.

A phone call to Dause and the parachute center was not returned to the News-Sentinel. Dause told the Bee on Wednesday he had no comment.

On Aug. 6, 2016, Los Banos resident Tyler Turner went to the parachute center, located at 23597 Highway 99 in Acampo, with his mother and three high school friends to celebrate his 18th birthday.

It was the first time all four of the teens had been skydiving, according to the lawsuit, and they all planned to perform tandem jumps with an instructor.

The suit alleges that once Francine Turner paid the fees for the jumps. The teens were taken to a room to watch a safety video. During the video, they were given a document to sign that contained a release of liability.

As soon as the last of the group signed the document — which was allegedly before the video ended, according to the suit — the teens were ushered into another room to be fitted for gear.

The airplane the teens boarded climbed to an altitude of 13,000 feet, and the suit states that there were no complications with their exit.

Tyler Turner’s tandem partner, Yong Kwon, pulled the ripcord for a drogue attached to the primary chute. The drogue is designed to inflate and help reduce velocity as jumpers descend, as it will inflate with air rushing into it.

However, the drogue did not inflate, and instead twisted violently in the wind, the lawsuit states. Kwon was then supposed to pull the release handles for the chute, but never did, the suit claims.

When the pair had descended to 3,000 feet, Kwon pulled the main chute’s “cutaway” and the release for the reserve drogue. Because the main chute was never deployed, it could not be “cutaway” to clear for the release of the reserve parachute.

As a result, the suit claims, the reserve drogue became entangled with the main chute drogue.

An investigation into the accident found that Kwon did not have proper training or certification to make the tandem jump. In addition, some of Tyler Turner’s friends were

younger than 18 at the time, and signed their own liability waivers, rather than their parents the day of the accident, the investigation found.

“He (the instructor) was still under a probationary period when they did the jump,” Van Der Walde told the Bee. “And he did not have the appropriate emergency training.”

Francine Salazar Turner told the Bee she misses her son terribly and wants to use the judgment money to start a scholarship fund in his name.

He was a straight-A student at Pacheco High School with a 4.3 grade point average, she said, and he earned a full scholarship to UC Merced, where he planned to focus on biomedical engineering.

“He was an amazing person,” she said. He had an adventurous spirit and wanted to do so much in this world.”

Francine Turner said she also hopes the skydiving center will be operated by someone else other than Dause.

“He showed no compassion whatsoever,” she said. “It was just horrible.”

According to records, there have been 20 deaths at the skydiving center since it opened in 1981, and 15 since 1999.

The most recent accident happened in 2019, when a 28-year-old woman was struck by a semi-truck on Highway 99 as she was attempting to land.

It was unclear how the woman drifted from the skydiving center and onto the highway, but an unofficial report from a wind sensor at Stockton Airport reported that winds were as high as 15 miles an hour that day.

Assembly Bill 295, also known as “Tyler’s Law,” was signed by Gov. Jerry Brown in September 2017. The bill, authored by Assemblywoman Susan Talamantes Eggman, D-Stockton, will hold parachute centers accountable in state court if they fail to abide by federal safety regulations.

Eggman proposed the law after it was discovered that Kwon was not properly certified as a tandem jump instructor.