Mark Fajardo, 13 year old boy is thrown off Phillipines fair ride, causing him to lose a lung as investigators seek to determine the cause of ‘freak accident’.
A preventable tragedy? A 13 year old boy has been left fighting for his life after an amusement park ride led to him losing a lung.
Video caught the moment when Mark Fajardo, 13, was flung violently from a high speed carousel fair ride into a steel barrier, resulted in the boy losing a lung.
The freak accident occurred on November 1. Fajardo and other youngsters were celebrating Halloween at an amusement park in Urdaneta City, Pangasinan province, in the Philippines, Viral Press reported.
Fajardo went on a ‘wave swinger’ attraction, a carousel-like contraption in which riders are swung around in a circle while suspended from ropes. Unfortunately, the boy’s ride reportedly went awry after one of the broken locks on his seat opened, causing him to fly out of his harness.
Footage shows (see below) the wave swinger whipping riders around like a whirling dervish as they shriek in delight. However, their cries of joy quickly turn into screams of terror as Fajardo is thrown out of his seat and into a set of steel grilles like a medieval catapult.
‘They’re blaming my son, saying he removed the lock,’
Fearing the worst, quick-thinking bystanders rushed the unconscious teen to the hospital. While Fajardo survived the accident, he had to have one of his lungs removed due to injuries he sustained from the impact.
‘Doctors told me he had to be careful since he now only has one lung left,’ the boy’s mom Marivic said, with the parent now fearing operators will ‘make up stories’ to cover their tracks.
‘They’re blaming my son, saying he removed the lock,’ the parent said. ‘Why would he do that when the ride was going so fast?’
Authorities have since launched a probe. leading to the attraction being temporarily shuttered during the investigation. ‘Our problem now is to see if anyone is monitoring or checking the rides before they are used,’ said Major General Ria Tacderan, a public information officer with the Pangasinan police.
Investigators discovered that the ride had been operating legally with a permit, which could be revoked if the operators are found guilty of safety infractions.
