A Saturday afternoon in the City of Freeport usually means a trip to the coast or a gathered crowd for a youth soccer match at the municipal parks. But for many families in Brazoria County, it also means a drive up Highway 288 toward one of the massive indoor trampoline parks serving the City of Freeport area. You walk into a building filled with primary colors, the smell of pepperoni pizza, and the rhythmic thud-thud-thud of hundreds of children becoming airborne. You sign a waiver on a digital kiosk in twelve seconds. You hand your child a neon wristband. And you believe, because the marketing told you so, that the environment is “safe family fun.”
Then the double-bounce happens.
One moment, your son is jumping on a bed he thinks is his own. The next, a larger teenager or an adult lands on that same mat, transferring thousands of Newtons of kinetic energy into your child’s frame. The physics are brutal: at a 3:1 weight ratio, a child’s launch force is multiplied by up to four times. The scream that follows is what Kaitlin Hill told ABC News was “the worst scream that you could ever have heard from a child.” Her son Colton was three when his femur snapped at a park. Like so many parents in the City of Freeport, she had “no idea” that the surface beneath his feet was a controlled catapult.
If your family is currently sitting in a room at CHI St. Luke’s Health-Brazosport or waiting for a specialist at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, the City of Freeport trampoline park manager has probably already told you that “accidents happen” and “you signed a waiver.” We are here to tell you that what happened to your child wasn’t an accident—it was the predictable output of a business decision. And that waiver you signed is not the wall the park wants you to believe it is.
For over 25 years, Ralph Manginello and our team at Attorney911 have stood in the gap between families and corporate defendants. We aren’t just personal injury lawyers; we are trial attorneys who have gone head-to-head with Fortune 500 giants like BP after the Texas City refinery explosion. We know how companies like Sky Zone, Inc. and Unleashed Brands (the parent of Urban Air) use layered LLCs and franchise agreements to hide their deep pockets. We’ve recovered multi-million dollar settlements for traumatic brain injuries and spinal cord damage—the same catastrophic results we see when City of Freeport families encounter a negligent park operator.
Call us at 1-888-ATTY-911. Hablamos Español. Our firm features associate attorney Lupe Peña, who used to sit on the other side of the table defending insurance companies and recreational businesses. He knows their playbook because he helped write it. He knows exactly where the holes are in their waivers and exactly how to pierce their liability shields.
The Evidence Clock: Why the Next 48 Hours Define Your Case in the City of Freeport
The most critical thing to understand after a trampoline injury in the City of Freeport is that evidence is engineered to disappear. The park is a business, and its risk management team is working before the EMS unit even clears the parking lot.
Park surveillance DVR systems in the City of Freeport area are typically set to overwrite on 7, 14, or 30-day cycles. If you wait a month to call a lawyer, the footage of the monitor on his phone at the exact moment of the double-bounce is gone forever. The incident reports are held within digital databases where metadata shows they are often “revised” or “updated” within 48 hours to shift blame toward the “guest’s error.”
When you retain our firm, our spoliation letter goes out to the park, the franchisor, and the insurance carrier within 24 hours. We don’t just ask them to be nice; we put them on formal notice that any destruction of video, time-clock records, or maintenance logs will be treated as intentional spoliation. We demand the preservation of the specific trampoline mat, the foam cubes, the springs, and the harness involved in the failure. In a Texas courtroom, evidence that “just happened” to vanish after a formal demand can lead to an adverse-inference instruction, where the jury is told to assume the missing evidence would have proved our case.
The clock is running. Every minute the park delays your phone call or promises to “get back to you” is a minute closer to the DVR overwriting your child’s injury. Call 1-888-ATTY-911 today.
Dismantling the Waiver: Why Your Signature Isn’t the End of the Story
Every parent who walks into a park in the City of Freeport signs that digital agreement. The park’s insurance adjuster will open every conversation by reminding you that you “accepted the inherent risks.” In Texas, we have a very specific response to that: the Dresser doctrine and the Munoz rule.
Under the landmark Texas Supreme Court case Dresser Industries v. Page Petroleum, a waiver must provide “fair notice.” This means it must meet the Express Negligence Doctrine—it must use the specific word “negligence” to release the operator’s own faults—and the language must be “conspicuous.” A wall of text in a small font on a glaring iPad screen at a crowded City of Freeport check-in counter often fails this test. If the waiver doesn’t meet these strict Texas standards, it isn’t worth the digital ink it’s written in.
More importantly for City of Freeport parents, the case of Munoz v. II Jaz Inc. established that a parent generally cannot waive a minor child’s personal injury claim in advance. Your signature might bar your own derivative claims for medical bills, but your child’s right to seek justice for their permanent disability or pain and suffering remains alive.
We also look at the formation of the contract. If your family’s primary language is Spanish and the park only provided an English waiver without a translation, the Delfingen doctrine in Texas allows us to challenge whether an agreement was ever actually formed. Lupe Peña speaks with our Spanish-speaking clients directly to identify these procedural failures.
Furthermore, no waiver in Texas protects a park from gross negligence. If a park in the City of Freeport knew a trampoline was torn, knew a foam pit was compacted below the depth required by ASTM F2970, or knew they were severely understaffed and chose to keep the doors open for profit anyway, that is gross negligence. A Harris County jury hit Cosmic Jump with $11.485 million—including $6 million in punitive damages—for exactly that kind of conscious indifference. They had a signed waiver, too. It didn’t save them.
The Physics of Failure: ASTM F2970 and the Duty of Care
Most personal injury firms can’t tell you what ASTM F2970-22 requires. We can cite it from memory. This is the safety standard written by the trampoline park industry itself. It is their own floor for what constitutes a safe park, and they routinely fall beneath it.
When we investigate a City of Freeport injury, we look at the specific provisions of F2970 against the park’s conduct:
- Attendant-to-Jumper Ratios: Was there at least one monitor per the required amount of jumpers? On a busy Saturday near the City of Freeport, those ratios often collapse as the park maximizes ticket sales.
- Foam Pit Depth: ASTM requires specific fill levels. When foam blocks stay in a pit for two years, they compact into a dense, non-absorbent “mat.” If your child lands head-first in a compacted pit, they hit the concrete floor beneath. That is a violation of the standard.
- Age and Weight Separation: The industry knows about the 14x injury multiplier. If the park allowed a 180-pound teenager to jump on the same mat as your 50-pound child, they breached their own duty of care.
We also compare these voluntary U.S. standards to the mandatory international ones, like EN ISO 23659:2022. The fact that Europe mandates higher safety protections than the U.S. voluntary regime is a powerful argument for a City of Freeport jury when we discuss the “reasonableness” of the park’s safety choices.
Catastrophic Injuries: Growth Plates, TBI, and the Rhabdo Risk
Trampoline injuries in children aren’t like adult injuries. A child’s bones are still developing at the growth plates, or physes. A Salter-Harris fracture—a break that goes through the growth plate—at age seven can mean the bone stops growing or grows crooked. A City of Freeport family might not see the full damage until their child hits a growth spurt at age thirteen and one leg is two inches shorter than the other.
We also focus heavily on head and neck trauma. SCIWORA (Spinal Cord Injury Without Radiographic Abnormality) is a terrifying pediatric phenomenon where a child’s neck can be stretched during a fall, causing a cord injury that doesn’t show up on an initial CT scan at the ER. If your child was sent home with “neck stiffness” but their symptoms are worsening, they need an MRI and an advocate who understands the physiology of pediatric spine trauma.
Then there is Exertional Rhabdomyolysis. Many City of Freeport families visit indoor parks during the brutal Texas summer. In a facility with a struggling HVAC system and a child jumping for ninety straight minutes while dehydrated, muscle tissue can begin to break down. This “rhabdo” releases myoglobin into the blood, which can lead to acute kidney failure.
Our firm is uniquely qualified to handle these cases. We are currently litigating a $10 million lawsuit against the University of Houston involving rhabdomyolysis and acute kidney failure. We have the medical experts, the nephrology consultants, and the litigation playbook to prove how dehydration and overexertion at a City of Freeport park can destroy a child’s health.
The 5-Layer Defendant Stack: Going Upstream for the Money
If you sue only the local “Mom and Pop LLC” operating the trampoline park in the City of Freeport, you may find they only have a $1 million primary insurance policy. For a child facing a lifetime of surgeries, a $5 million life-care plan, and lost earning capacity, that is not enough.
We go upstream. Our corporate archeology process identifies every layer of the defendant stack:
- The Local Operator: Direct negligence in supervision and maintenance.
- The Franchisee: The business entity usually owning multiple locations.
- The Franchisor: Brands like Sky Zone Franchising LLC or Urban Air Franchise Holdings who dictate the rules the local park ignored.
- The Parent Company: Sky Zone, Inc. or Unleashed Brands, often backed by private equity firms like Palladium Equity Partners or Seidler Equity.
- The Manufacturer: If a spring snapped or a net failed, the companies like Jumpking, Skywalker, or Springfree are brought in under strict product liability.
By naming the franchisor, we access the “additional insured” layers of their massive umbrella and excess policies. In the Damion Collins case against Urban Air, the franchisor absorbed 40% of the $15.6 million award because they had a “systemic failure” to implement safety changes. We use that same architecture for our City of Freeport clients.
Backyard Trampolines in the City of Freeport: Corrosion and the Attractive Nuisance
In the City of Freeport, the coastal air is thick with salt. That salt air is a silent killer for backyard trampolines. Polypropylene nets lose their tensile strength under 100-degree UV exposure, and the galvanized coating on steel springs can develop rust micro-pitting in just two seasons.
If your child was injured on a neighbor’s trampoline in the City of Freeport, the “Attractive Nuisance” doctrine likely applies. Texas law holds that if you have something on your property that is certain to attract children (like a trampoline) and you fail to secure it with a fence or a locked gate, you are liable for the injuries to a “trespassing” child of tender years who could not appreciate the danger.
We also investigate manufacturer defects for backyard units. If a Jumpking or Skywalker trampoline weld failed, or if a Bouncepro net from Walmart tore upon first impact, we file a product liability claim. We’ve seen the CPSC recalls for SEGMART toddler trampolines and Skywalker enclosures. We know which batch numbers are prone to failure and which owner’s manuals failed to warn you about the 1999 AAP policy advising against home trampoline use.
Why City of Freeport Families Choose Attorney911
We represent the parent at the trauma-bay bedside. Client Chad Harris said of our firm, “You are NOT just some client… You are FAMILY to them.” We treat your child’s case with the same intensity we’d bring to our own children’s safety.
- Federal Court Experience: Ralph Manginello is admitted to the Southern District of Texas. We aren’t afraid of the corporate defense firms hired by Unleashed Brands. We’ve been in those courtrooms for decades.
- Defense-Side Insider Knowledge: Lupe Peña knows the arguments the park’s lawyer is drafting right now because he used to write them. We pre-empt their “assumption of risk” defense before the first deposition.
- Advanced Resources: We pay the upfront costs for the biomechanical engineer to reconstruct the accident and the life-care planner to calculate the next 40 years of medical needs. You pay nothing unless we recover money for you.
- Local Roots, National Reach: From our Houston base, we serve the City of Freeport and handle trampoline cases across the country. We know the Brazoria County jury pool and we know the national chain patterns.
Frequently Asked Questions for City of Freeport Parents
Can I sue if I signed the waiver at a City of Freeport trampoline park?
In most cases, yes. Texas law frequently protects a child’s right to sue even if a parent signed a release. If the injury was caused by gross negligence—like failing to maintain foam pit depth—the waiver is generally void.
What should I do if the City of Freeport park manager says the video is “missing”?
Call us immediately. We retain forensic digital examiners who can image the DVR. If the video was deleted after you reported the injury, that is spoliation of evidence, and we will ask the court for sanctions against the park.
How long do I have to file a lawsuit in Texas?
For adults, the statute of limitations is two years. For children, the clock typically doesn’t start until they turn eighteen, giving them until age twenty to file. However, the evidence clock is much faster. Video and witness memories disappear in weeks.
My child has dark urine after jumping—is that an emergency?
Yes. That is a hallmark sign of rhabdomyolysis, a condition where muscle tissue breaks down and poisons the kidneys. Go to the ER immediately and ask for a CK test. We litigate these cases specifically and understand the medicine involved.
Who pays my child’s medical bills while the case is pending?
We help you navigate your health insurance and we can often work with medical providers on a “letter of protection,” which allows your child to get the care they need now with the balance paid from the final settlement.
Call 1-888-ATTY-911: The Case Starts Today
Your child’s life changed in one bad landing. The trampoline park’s board of directors is already looking at their profit margin for the quarter. You need someone looking at your child’s future.
We represent families in the City of Freeport who refuse to be bullied by a kiosk waiver. We represent the parents who want answers and the children who deserve a recovery fund that lasts as long as their injuries do.
Call Attorney911 today. No fee unless we win. 1-888-ATTY-911 (1-888-288-9911). 24/7 availability. Three Texas offices to serve you.
