One bounce. One bad landing. One broken neck. That is all it takes at a trampoline park.
For many families in Kirby, a trip to a jump park is a routine Saturday afternoon—a way to escape the South Texas heat and let the kids burn off energy. You walk into a facility like Urban Air, Altitude, or The Rush Fun Park. You wait in a long line at a kiosk. You see a series of screens with dense legal text. You tap “agree” because your child is tugging at your arm, and you handed over your credit card twenty minutes earlier. You assume the park is safe because it is open for business. You assume the staff is trained. You assume the “waiver” you just signed is a formality.
Then you hear it.
Kaitlin “Kati” Hill, a mother who lived through the nightmare we see every day, told ABC News it was “the worst scream that you could ever have heard from a child.” Her three-year-old son, Colton, broke his femur—the strongest bone in the human body—during a “Toddler Time” session. Like so many parents in Kirby and across Bexar County, Kati and her husband later said, “We had no idea. We would have never put our baby boy on a trampoline if we would have known.”
We are Attorney911, The Manginello Law Firm. We represent families who find themselves in the trauma bay of University Hospital in San Antonio or Texas Children’s, watching a surgeon explain what happens when a growth plate is destroyed at age nine. We wrote this guide because Kirby families deserve to know what the trampoline park industry is hiding behind those kiosk screens.
What happened to your child wasn’t a “freak accident.” It was the predictable output of a system designed to maximize margin and minimize safety. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has been warning against recreational trampoline use since 1999. ASTM F2970—the industry’s own safety standard—was written by the parks themselves to create a floor that many then choose to ignore.
Our founder, Ralph Manginello, brings over 25 years of courtroom experience to this fight. He has gone head-to-head with some of the largest corporations in the world, including BP after the Texas City refinery explosion. Our team includes associate attorney Lupe Peña, a former insurance defense lawyer who used to represent the very same recreational businesses and insurers we now sue. He knows which waiver clauses Kirby courts will throw out and which ones the adjusters use to bully parents into cheap settlements.
If your child was injured at a trampoline park in Kirby, the clock is running. Surveillance video is being overwritten. Incident reports are being “sanitized.” Call us at 1-888-ATTY-911. Hablamos Español. We represent families on a contingency fee basis: you pay nothing unless we win.
The Reality of Trampoline Injuries in Kirby and Bexar County
Kirby is a vibrant part of the San Antonio metro, a place where youth sports and family gatherings are the center of the community. Within a short drive of Kirby, there are dozens of “adventure parks” competing for your business. Whether it is an Urban Air location in Northeast San Antonio, an Altitude park, or The Rush Fun Park, these facilities operate at industrial scale.
Nationally, over 300,000 trampoline-related emergency room visits happen every year. According to the American Journal of Roentgenology (AJR 2024), up to 1.6% of all pediatric ED trauma visits in the United States are now trampoline-related. A study published in January 2024 in the journal Pediatrics by Teague et al. tracked over 13,000 injuries from 8.4 million jumper-hours. They found that foam pits—which many Kirby parents assume are the “soft” part of the park—actually have an injury rate of 1.91 per 1,000 jumper-hours. High-performance jumping is even higher, at 2.11 per 1,000.
In Kirby, where backyard trampolines from Jumpking, Skywalker, and Bouncepro fill thousands of yards, the danger is doubled. We see the same catastrophic mechanics in backyards that we see in the big chains: double-bounces, net failures, and head-first landings.
Since 1998, Ralph Manginello has seen the industry move from a handful of parks to a multi-billion-dollar corporate machine. Today, those parks are owned by private equity giants. Sky Zone, Inc. (formerly known as CircusTrix LLC) is backed by Palladium Equity Partners. Urban Air’s parent, Unleashed Brands, was acquired by Seidler Equity Partners in 2023. These are not family-run businesses; they are margin-focused conglomerates. When we sue for a Kirby family, we aren’t just suing the local LLC. We trace the money upstream to the corporate parent. We’ve done it with BP and Walmart, and we’ll do it for your child.
What Happened: The Mechanisms of Catastrophe
A trampoline is a machine that stores and releases massive amounts of energy. When that energy meets a child’s developing bones, the results are devastating. We categorize these injuries into specific mechanisms, each of which points to a specific failure of duty by the park or the manufacturer.
The Double-Bounce: The Kirby “Catapult”
The most frequent injury mechanism we litigate is the double-bounce. This happens when two people jump on the same mat. When a heavier person (like a teenager or a father) lands while a smaller child is pushing off, the kinetic energy from the heavier jumper is transferred to the smaller one.
Physics don’t lie. According to the research of Nysted and Drogset, smaller jumpers are roughly 14 times more likely to be injured in these collisions than the heavier person. In one instance at Flight Deck in Fort Worth, a four-year-old suffered Salter-Harris growth plate fractures after a single-occupancy rule was ignored. ASTM F2970 requires parks to enforce weight-class separation. When a Kirby park lets an adult and a toddler on the same court, they are violating the industry’s own safety standard. They aren’t running a park; they’re operating a catapult where your child is the projectile.
Foam Pit Failures: The Illusion of Safety
Foam pits in Kirby-area parks look like clouds. In reality, multiple catastrophic cervical spine injuries occur when jumpers land head-first or “bottom out.” ASTM F2970 has specific requirements for foam pit depth and foam block rotation. Over time, those foam cubes compact. If the park hasn’t refilled or “fluffed” the pit, your child is essentially diving into a hard floor.
In some cases, like the Shawn Parker suit at an Altitude park in Odessa, the “foam pit” was found to be just a dense pad over a hard surface. We see the same patterns locally. If your child dove into a pit and couldn’t move, it wasn’t “bad luck.” It was likely a maintenance failure that our investigators will document through foam-density testing and depth measurements.
Harness and Attraction Failures
Urban Air and similar chains have moved beyond trampolines into “adventure” elements. Ziplines like the Sky Rider, climbing walls, and ropes courses provide high-altitude thrills. But they also provide high-altitude falls. In Sugar Land, a girl fell 30 feet from a climbing wall because an Urban Air attendant failed to attach the safety line. In Georgia, a six-year-old was strangled by a Sky Rider cord while her father had to climb the netting to save her because the staff didn’t know what to do.
If your child was hurt on one of these “bolt-on” attractions, the manufacturer—companies like UA Attractions, LLC or Ropes Courses, Inc.—may be just as liable as the park operator. We know how to run these product-liability claims against the designers who put “cool” before “safe.”
Extended-Jumping Rhabdomyolysis
One injury that Kirby families—and even many doctors—often miss is rhabdomyolysis. It happens when a child jumps for 90 or 120 minutes straight in a hot indoor facility without enough water. The muscle tissue literally begins to die and spills into the bloodstream.
We are currently litigating a $10 million lawsuit against the University of Houston involving rhabdo and acute kidney failure. The pathology in that case is identical to the mechanism we see at trampoline parks. If your child has dark, “cola-colored” urine or intense muscle pain days after visiting a Kirby park, it is a medical emergency. You need a lawyer who understands the CK lab values and the renal failure cascade. That’s what we do.
Safety Standards: The Rules Kirby Parks Must Follow
The defense lawyers for the big chains will try to tell you their clients followed “all the rules.” Our job is to show the jury which rules they broke.
The core standards include:
- ASTM F2970: The standard for commercial jump courts. It covers everything from how many attendants must be on the floor to how many cents of “cushion” must exist in the foam.
- ASTM F381: The standard for home trampolines. If your child was hurt in a backyard in Kirby, we look at whether the mat, net, and springs met this spec.
- EN ISO 23659:2022: This is the mandatory international standard for Europe. While the US relies on “voluntary” rules, we use the international standard to prove that the Kirby operators are choosing to ignore safety designs that are already required in the rest of the world.
- The AAP Policy: The American Academy of Pediatrics has advised against home trampoline use for over 25 years. This establishes “foreseeability.” The manufacturers and parks can’t say they didn’t know the risks; the pediatricians of America have been shouting them from the rooftops since 1999.
When we depose a park manager from a Kirby location, we don’t ask if they are “safe.” We ask why they violated Section 10 of ASTM F2970. We ask when the last time they performed a “deep inspection” of the mat seams was. Most Kirby parks have an operations manual that mirrors these rules. If the manual says one thing and the video shows another, we have our case.
Responsibility: Why Your Signature Didn’t End Your Case
The #1 reason parents in Kirby don’t call a lawyer is the waiver. They think, “I signed it, so I can’t sue.”
Think again.
Texas law has some of the strongest protections for children in the country. In the landmark case Munoz v. II Jaz Inc., Texas courts held that a parent cannot waive a minor’s personal cause of action for injuries. While the parent might waive their own right to sue for medical bills, the child’s claim survives.
Beyond that, no waiver in Texas protects a park from gross negligence. In the Cosmic Jump case in Harris County, the jury awarded over $11 million precisely because the park was grossly negligent. They knew a slide was torn. They had actual knowledge of the risk. They didn’t fix it. Under Moriel and the Texas Civil Practice & Remedies Code, that conduct destroys any waiver defense.
Our associate Lupe Peña knows this playbook. Because he used to sit on the other side of the table defending these companies, he knows exactly which “click-wrap” and “kiosk” agreements are full of holes. He knows that if the waiver was only in English but your family primarily speaks Spanish, the Delfingen doctrine may render that contract void.
Don’t let a piece of paper from a Kirby check-in counter stop you from getting justice for your child. The waiver is noise. We are the signal.
Catastrophic Pediatric Injuries: The Kirby Medical Reality
When a child is hurt, the damage is not just “now.” It’s “for life.” Kirby families who take their children to the Level 1 pediatric trauma center at University Hospital need an attorney who speaks the language of the medicine.
We focus on the catastrophic categories that trampolines produce:
- SCIWORA: Spinal Cord Injury Without Radiographic Abnormality. This is a pediatric phenomenon where a child’s spine looks normal on a CT scan, but they are paralyzed. The ligaments are so flexible in children that the spine can stretch and bounce back, crushing the cord without breaking a bone.
- Salter-Harris Fractures: Damage to the growth plate. A broken ankle at age eight isn’t just a broken ankle. If that growth plate is destroyed, your daughter’s leg may be measurably shorter than the other by the time she’s twelve. These damages anchor in the $500,000 to $2,000,000 range in national verdicts.
- Vertebral Artery Dissection: This is what happened in the Elle Yona case that went viral on TikTok with 27 million views. A sudden twist in the neck during a backflip can tear the artery and cause a “spinal-cord stroke.” It is often misdiagnosed as a panic attack.
- Traumatic Brain Injury: Falling from a height or a head-to-head collision at a Kirby park can cause a diffuse axonal injury (DAI)—the shearing of brain fibers.
If your child is in a body cast or a wheelchair, their case value isn’t based on the ER bill. It’s based on a Pediatric Life-Care Plan. We work with life-care planners and forensic economists to project the cost of every surgery, every therapy session, and every lost career opportunity your child will face over the next 70 years.
The Evidence: The 7-Day Kirby Survival Clock
Evidence at a Kirby trampoline park disappears on a schedule.
- Surveillance Video: DVR systems at these parks are often set to overwrite in as little as 7 to 30 days.
- Incident Reports: We look for the “metadata.” Parks often have an original report filed by the attendant that says “he fell because the pad slipped.” Two days later, a manager “revises” the report to say “guest error.”
- The Employee Roster: Attendants at these parks—usually 16 to 19-year-olds making minimum wage—have a turnover rate of 150% a year. If we don’t find them now, they’ll be at a different job by the time we file suit.
Our spoliation letter is already drafted. It goes out via certified mail within 24 hours of your retention. We demand the DVR hard drive. We demand the training records. We demand the inspection logs. We don’t wait for them to “lose” the footage from that Saturday afternoon in Kirby.
Why Kirby Families Choose Attorney911
We represent families, not files. When you call us, you aren’t getting a referral service. You are getting Ralph Manginello and Lupe Peña.
- 25+ Years of Experience: From the BP refinery explosion to the University of Houston hazing case, we’ve taken on the corporate elite and won.
- Former Insurance Defense Knowledge: We know the defenses before they raise them. We know the “friendly adjuster” call is a trap. We know how they calculate “pain and suffering.”
- No Upfront Costs: We advance every dollar of the investigation. We hire the biomechanical engineer to reconstruct the jump. We hire the pediatric neurologist. You keep your money.
- Bilingual Representation: Hablamos Español. Lupe Peña speaks with you directly—no interpreters, no delays.
- Provable Results: Our firm has recovered multi-million dollar settlements for the exact injury categories a Kirby trampoline park or a defective backyard trampoline can cause.
As our client Chad Harris said, “You are NOT just some client… You are FAMILY to them.” That is the Attorney911 promise to every Kirby household.
Frequently Asked Questions for Kirby Parents
Can I sue if I signed the Kirby park’s waiver on an iPad?
Yes. Texas law, particularly the Munoz and Dresser cases, provides multiple paths to void that waiver. If the park was grossly negligent, if the child is a minor, or if the language wasn’t conspicuous, the waiver will not stop us.
What should I do if the Kirby trampoline park manager won’t call 911?
Call 911 yourself immediately. Multiple parents have reported that managers in the Bexar County area are instructed to downplay injuries and avoid calling EMS. Do not let them “move” your child off the court if they have neck or back pain.
How long do I have to file a lawsuit in Kirby, Texas?
Generally, you have two years from the date of injury. However, for a minor’s personal claim, the clock is “tolled” (paused) until they turn eighteen. But remember: while you have time to file, you don’t have time to wait. The evidence overwrites in days.
Is the “Toddler Time” at Bexar County parks really safer?
No. In fact, many of the most serious growth-plate and femur fractures we see occur during these sessions because the staff is often less vigilant. The AAP says no child under six should be on a trampoline. The park knows this and markets to you anyway.
How much is a trampoline injury settlement worth in Kirby?
It depends on the severity. An uncomplicated broken arm may settle for five or low-six figures. A catastrophic spinal cord injury or a TBI can result in settlements or verdicts in the multi-million dollar range, just like the $11.485M Cosmic Jump verdict.
What if the injury happened on a neighbor’s trampoline in Kirby?
Texas follows the “attractive nuisance” doctrine. Even if your child was a visitor (or a trespasser), the homeowner or their insurance can be held liable if the trampoline was an unsecured danger. Most homeowners’ insurance policies exclude trampolines, but we look for umbrella layers and manufacturer defect claims as well.
Your Case Starts Today: Kirby Evidence Preservation
What happens to your child at a Kirby jump park wasn’t an accident—it was the predictable output of a system. The corporate parents behind Sky Zone and Urban Air operate below the industry-written safety standards to protect their profit. They count on you believing the waiver and the “friendly” insurance adjuster.
Attorney911 was built for exactly this fight. Ralph Manginello brings federal-court-tested grit. Lupe Peña brings insider defense knowledge. Together, weighted by a 50-state database of trampoline laws, we provide Kirby families with a level of authority most firms can’t reach.
Your child’s case will be decided by what gets preserved this week. By Day 10, the video of the Saturday afternoon your child was hurt is gone. By Day 30, the “revised” incident report is the only one in the file. Call 1-888-ATTY-911 now. Hablamos Español. Our fee is contingency only—no fee unless we win. We will advance the costs of the experts and the forensic analysis your child’s future depends on.
Call 1-888-ATTY-911. We represent children. We represent families. The case starts now.
