“His feet hit the mat, and almost instantly his knees buckled down, and he just let out the worst scream that you could ever have heard from a child.”
That is Kaitlin “Kati” Hill describing to ABC News the moment her three-year-old son, Colton, suffered a broken femur at a trampoline park. His thigh bone, the strongest bone in the human body, snapped because an older, heavier child landed on the same trampoline bed. Kati’s warning has been shared over 240,000 times on social media. She ended her message with five words that haunt every parent in Richwood who ever signed a kiosk waiver: “We had no idea.”
We have spent over 25 years representing families who had no idea. We represent parents in Richwood who are currently sitting at a hospital bedside, watching a surgeon explain what happens when a growth plate is destroyed at age nine. We speak to mothers and fathers who feel a crushing sense of guilt for letting their children jump, and we tell them the same thing every time: This is not your fault. It was never an accident. It was the predictable output of a system designed to prioritize profit margins over your child’s spinal cord.
At The Manginello Law Firm, we are not just personal injury attorneys; we are a specialized trampoline injury practice with a national reach launched from our deep Texas roots. We bring more than two decades of federal court experience to Richwood. Our founder, Ralph Manginello, has gone head-to-head with some of the largest corporations in the world, including BP after the Texas City refinery explosion. We treat the conglomerates behind commercial trampoline parks—parent companies like Sky Zone, Inc. (renamed from CircusTrix LLC), backed by Palladium Equity Partners, and Unleashed Brands (the parent of Urban Air), backed by Seidler Equity Partners—with the same relentless scrutiny we apply to Fortune 500 oil companies.
If your family’s life changed in one jump at a facility in Richwood or the surrounding Brazoria County area, you need to understand that the paper you signed at the front desk is not the shield they want you to believe it is. Whether it happened at the Urban Air Trampoline and Adventure Park in Lake Jackson, or at any of the major facilities our Richwood families frequent, the legal clock is ticking. More importantly, the evidence clock is running.
Park surveillance video in Richwood is often overwritten in as little as 7 to 30 days. Incident reports are frequently “revised” on park computer systems within 48 hours. Our spoliation letter goes out within 24 hours of being retained. We dont wait. We file. We win. Call 1-888-ATTY-911 today.
Why Trampoline Injuries in Richwood Are Never “Accidents”
The commercial trampoline park industry in Texas wants you to believe that if your kid gets a “trampoline fracture” of the proximal tibia, it’s just bad luck. The medical literature and industry internal standards prove otherwise. For every catastrophe that occurs in a park near Richwood, there is a business decision that made it possible.
The Physics of the Double-Bounce
The most common mechanism of injury we see in Richwood involves the “double-bounce.” To a child, it feels like a boost. To a physicist, it’s a massive transfer of kinetic energy. When a 200-pound adult lands on a trampoline bed at the same instant an 80-pound child from Richwood is pushing off, the child’s launch force is multiplied by up to 4x. The child is no longer jumping; they are being catapulted at a velocity their developing musculoskeletal system cannot handle.
The industry has known about this for decades. The British Journal of Sports Medicine (Nysted & Drogset, 2006) established that when two children of different sizes share a trampoline, the smaller child is roughly 14 times more likely to be injured. This is why ASTM F2970, the safety standard written by the trampoline industry itself, requires parks to operationalize age and weight separation. When a park in Richwood allows a teenager and a toddler on the same court to save on staffing costs, they are choosing to accept that 14x injury risk.
The Foam Pit Illusion
Foam pits in Richwood look like soft, safe clouds. In reality, they are one of the most dangerous attractions in the park. When a jumper enters a foam pit head-first, their head can wedge between foam cubes, causing the head to stop while the rest of the body’s momentum continues. This produces cervical hyperflexion—the same mechanism that causes permanent paralysis.
A study by Eager in 2012 proved that foam pits provide non-uniform deceleration. This is why the industry is currently trying to replace foam pits with pressurized airbag systems. They know foam pits are “catastrophe traps.” If the park in Richwood where your child was hurt still uses a foam pit that is compacted, dirty, or below the ASTM-required fill depth, they are operating below the safety floor the rest of the world treats as a ceiling.
The Regulatory Vacuum in Texas
It surprises most parents in Richwood to learn that Texas has NO statewide trampoline park safety act. While states like Arizona passed “Ty’s Law” after the 2012 death of Ty Thomasson at SkyPark Phoenix, Texas legislators have allowed safety bills to die in committee as recently as 2023.
In Richwood, the main trampoline decks are statutorily excluded from state inspection under Texas Occupations Code § 2151.002. Only the “Class B” inflatable attractions—the bungee tramps, the Sky Riders, and the inflatable slides—are regulated by the Texas Department of Insurance (TDI). This regulatory gap means that the burden of safety in Richwood falls entirely on the park’s own internal SOPs and your attorney’s ability to prove they were violated. We use the TDI’s regulatory ceiling for inflatables as the floor for what the rest of the park should have been doing.
The 5-Layer Defendant Stack: Who We Sue in Richwood
When we say we hold trampoline parks accountable, we don’t just sue the local LLC in Richwood. We perform corporate archeology on every case to find the deep pockets that are hiding behind franchise agreements.
- The Operator LLC: This is the local business in Richwood on the lease. They usually carry a $1 million primary policy—which often doesn’t cover a single year of care for a traumatic brain injury (TBI).
- The Franchisee: Many Richwood parks are owned by multi-unit groups that operate 10 or 15 locations. They have their own insurance layers.
- The Franchisor: Entities like Sky Zone Franchising LLC or Urban Air Franchise Holdings. They mandate the training (or lack thereof) and the safety manuals.
- The Brand Parent: Sky Zone, Inc. or Unleashed Brands. These are massive corporations that we have the resources to fight.
- The Private Equity Sponsor: Firms like Palladium Equity or Seidler Equity. If they approved cost-cutting measures in Richwood that reduced the number of court monitors, we go after them.
We name every layer. We discover every policy. We recently successfully litigated a multi-defendant case that parallels the complexity of trampoline park structures—an active $10 million lawsuit involving rhabdomyolysis and institutional accountability. Whether it’s reaching a corporate parent in Dallas or a PE firm in New York, we make the decision-makers in the boardroom pay for the injuries they caused on the court in Richwood.
The Richwood Evidence Clock: Why 7 Days Is Your Limit
Imagine a Saturday afternoon at an Urban Air near Richwood. The court is packed. A sixteen-year-old Richwood High student is on his phone instead of watching the dodgeball court. Your child is double-bounced and suffers a Salter-Harris growth plate fracture.
By the time you get home from the emergency room at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, the park’s risk management team is already working.
- Surveillance DVRs: In many Richwood facilities, the video system begins overwriting the oldest footage in 7 to 10 days.
- Waiver Metadata: Your signature at the kiosk created a digital audit trail. The park can “update” their waiver database, purging the version you actually signed, in as little as 72 hours.
- Witness Disappearance: The monitor who was distracted probably won’t work there next month. Trampoline parks have an annual turnover rate of up to 150%.
Our firm uses digital forensic tools like FTK Imager and Cellebrite to recover evidence Richwood parks think is gone. We send a 10-section preservation demand within 24 hours of being hired. We demand the DVR hard drive, the kiosk audit logs, and the original incident reports before the park has a chance to “sanitize” them.
The Waiver Myth: Why Texas Law Is on Your Side
The most common lie told to Richwood parents is “You signed a waiver, you can’t sue.” As an attorney who previously spent years defending insurance companies and recreational businesses from the other side of the table, Lupe Peña knows the holes in that argument because he used to try to plug them.
In Texas, your child’s rights are protected by three major doctrines that we use to dismantle park waivers:
1. The Munoz Rule (Minors)
The landmark Texas case Munoz v. II Jaz, Inc. (1993) established that a parent cannot sign away a minor child’s personal-injury cause of action in advance. Even if you signed the iPad in Richwood, your child’s claim survives your signature.
2. The Dresser Fair-Notice Doctrine
Under Dresser Industries v. Page Petroleum, a Texas waiver must be “conspicuous.” If the negligence release was buried in a long paragraph or used tiny font on a tablet screen in a crowded Richwood lobby, it fails the “fair notice” test and is legally void. It must also use the specific word “negligence”—generic “all claims” language isn’t enough in Texas.
3. The Gross Negligence Carve-Out
No court in Texas allows a waiver to release a park from gross negligence. When a jury in Harris County awarded $11.485 million against Cosmic Jump, they did so because the park knew about a torn trampoline and let kids use it anyway. That is the definition of gross negligence: subjective awareness of an extreme risk and conscious indifference to it. If the park in Richwood knew a monitor was untrained or a foam pit was compacting and did nothing, the waiver is a scrap of paper.
Catastrophic Pediatric Injuries: The Richwood Parent’s Reality
Trampoline injuries in children are biomechanically distinct. They are not simply “broken bones.” They are life-altering medical events that require specialized legal and medical advocacy.
Salter-Harris Growth Plate Fractures
In a Richwood child, the growth plates (physes) are made of cartilage. They are often weaker than the surrounding ligaments. A Salter-Harris fracture can disrupt bone growth entirely. If a child in Richwood is injured at age seven, the true damage—a limb-length discrepancy or a crooked leg—might not manifest until they hit their growth spurt at age thirteen. We build life-care plans that project these costs into the future, ensuring your child has the funds for corrective osteotomies they don’t even need yet.
SCIWORA (Spinal Cord Injury Without Radiographic Abnormality)
This is a terrifying pediatric phenomenon. A child lands on their head in a Richwood foam pit and has neck pain, but the CT scan in the ER looks normal. Because of their flexible spines, the spinal cord can be crushed or stretched even when the bones don’t break. Many ERs miss this, telling parents to “walk it off.” Hours later, the child is paralyzed. We know the imaging signatures (AJR 2024) and the diagnostic errors that multiply damages in these cases.
Exertional Rhabdomyolysis
If your child has dark-brown “cola-colored” urine, severe muscle pain, and extreme lethargy 24 hours after a visit to a hot indoor park in Richwood, they may have “rhabdo.” This is a medical emergency where muscle tissue breaks down and poisons the kidneys. Our firm is currently litigating a $10 million lawsuit involving rhabdomyolysis and acute kidney failure. We have the medical experts and the institutional-accountability playbook to win these cases.
Hablamos Español: Justicia para las Familias de Richwood
Muchas de las víctimas de lesiones en parques de trampolines en Richwood son niños de familias hispanohablantes. Nuestro abogado asociado Lupe Peña es hispanohablante nativo y representa a nuestros clientes directamente—sin intérpretes, sin traductores, sin retrasos.
Si usted firmó un documento en inglés y su idioma principal es el español, la doctrina Delfingen US-Texas v. Valenzuela puede invalidar su renuncia de responsabilidad. En Texas, si el parque no le proporcionó una traducción o no se aseguró de que usted entendiera lo que estaba firmando en una tableta electrónica, podemos atacar la validez de ese contrato. Su familia merece un abogado que peleará tan duro como peleó la familia Lakhani en Sugar Land. Llame al 1-888-ATTY-911. Hablamos Español.
How Much Is Your Case Worth?
We don’t settle for the $1 million primary policy when your child needs $10 million in lifetime care. National industry data and our own internal research database show the following ranges for catastrophic trampoline injury recoveries:
- Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI): $1.5M – $9.8M
- Pediatric Spinal Cord Injury: $5M – $25M+ (Anchored by life-care planning)
- Amputation: $1.9M – $8.6M
- Wrongful Death: $1.9M – $9.5M
- Salter-Harris Growth Plate Fractures: $500K – $2M
We have recovered multi-million dollar settlements for victims of the same categories of injuries that trampolines produce. As client Glenda Walker said, “They fought for me to get every dime I deserved.” We treat our clients like families, not file numbers. As Chad Harris said, “You are NOT just some client… You are FAMILY to them.”
Frequently Asked Questions for Richwood Parents
Can I sue if my child was double-bounced by another child?
Yes. The park has a non-delegable duty to supervise and enforce the one-jumper-per-bed rule. The fact that another child initiated the bounce does not excuse the park’s failure to have a monitor present to stop it. ASTM F2970 puts the burden on the operator, not the child.
How long does a Richwood trampoline park keep surveillance video?
Most parks in the Richwood area use DVR systems that overwrite on a rolling cycle of 7 to 30 days. Some may keep it for 90 days. Without a formal spoliation letter from an attorney, that video is almost certainly gone by the time you realize how serious your child’s injury is. We preserve it within 24 hours of your call.
I sign a waiver for my child every week. Does that change anything?
Actually, it might help our case. Under Cerna v. Pearland Urban Air (2025), Texas courts look closely at delegation clauses. But multiple signings can actually create confusion about which version is in effect, and if the park didn’t have you sign on the specific day of the injury—as happened in the Lakhani case—their defense may vanish entirely.
What if my child was injured on a neighbor’s backyard trampoline in Richwood?
Texas law handles this under the “attractive nuisance” doctrine. If the trampoline was accessible to neighbor children (no fence, ladder left on) and the owner didn’t exercise reasonable care, they may be liable. We look at two layers here: the homeowner’s umbrella policy and a potential product liability claim against the manufacturer (like Jumpking or Skywalker) if a component failed.
Why Richwood Families Choose Attorney911
Most personal injury firms in Texas take a trampoline case and treat it like a simple slip-and-fall. We don’t. We built our practice around the intersection of pediatric medicine, industrial-grade corporate archeology, and high-stakes litigation.
- 25+ Years Experience: Ralph Manginello is admitted to the Southern District of Texas federal court and brings BP-scale litigation toughness to every park chain.
- The Defense Manual Edge: We have a former insurance defense lawyer who knows exactly which clauses in the Sky Zone or Urban Air waiver have been voided in other cases.
- No Upfront Costs: You pay nothing unless we win. We advance every expense—the biomechanist, the pediatric orthopedic consultant, the ASTM compliance specialist.
- The Rhabdo Authority: We are the only firm in the region with an active $10 million institutional-negligence case involving rhabdomyolysis and kidney failure.
What happened to your child at a park near Richwood wasn’t an accident. It was the predictable output of a system that operated below the ASTM safety floor to hit a profit target. The park has a fleet of corporate lawyers protecting their margin. Your child deserves a team that will protect their future.
Call 1-888-ATTY-911. We are available 24/7. Hablamos Español. Your consultation is free, and the spoliation letter goes out heute.
The park has lawyers. The franchisor has lawyers. The corporate parent has lawyers. The PE sponsor has lawyers. So do we.
1-888-ATTY-911.
