On a hot Saturday afternoon in the Town of Trent, the atmosphere inside a packed trampoline park can shift from laughter to a life-altering emergency in less than two seconds. We have seen this transition too many times. A three-year-old boy named Colton was jumping during a “Toddler Time” session in a Texas park when a larger child landed on the same trampoline bed. His mother, Kaitlin “Kati” Hill, later told ABC News that the sound her son’s femur made when it snapped was followed by “the worst scream that you could ever have heard from a child.” Colton spent the next several months in a body cast. His mother’s public warning has been shared hundreds of thousands of times because, as she put it, “We had no idea.”
At the Manginello Law Firm, we know that families in the Town of Trent and across Taylor County visit these facilities because they believe the marketing. They believe the “Safety First” signs and the “certified” court monitors. But we understand the architecture of the industry differently. We know that roughly 1.6% of all pediatric emergency department trauma visits in the United States are now trampoline-related, according to the American Journal of Roentgenology (AJR 2024). We know that behind the neon lights of national chains like Urban Air, Sky Zone, and Altitude, there is a profit-driven system that routinely prioritizes throughput over the safety of your child.
If your family is currently at a hospital bedside in an Abilene or San Angelo trauma center, or if you are managing the long, quiet recovery of a child in a body cast at home in the Town of Trent, you need more than a law firm that “handles personal injury.” You need a team that has spent 25 years making corporate defendants pay. Our founder, Ralph Manginello, has litigated against Fortune 500 giants like BP, Walmart, and Amazon. Our team includes a former insurance defense attorney, Lupe Peña, who used to write and defend the very waiver language these parks rely on. We know their playbook because we helped write it—and now we use that insider knowledge to dismantle it for you.
The Reality of Trampoline Injuries in Taylor County
The Town of Trent sits in a region where indoor recreation is a survival strategy during the 100-degree Texas summers. When the heat makes outdoor play dangerous, families flock to facilities like Formula Fun in Abilene or Urban Air locations in the surrounding metro area. These parks often serve as the primary venue for birthday parties, school field trips, and youth sports team events. For every hour of “Glow Jump” or “Open Jump” sold, the risk of a catastrophic cervical spine injury, a Salter-Harris growth plate fracture, or a traumatic brain injury (TBI) scales upward.
We do not view these injuries as “freak accidents.” We view them as the predictable output of a business model that relies on teenage monitors with minimal training to supervise complex physics. A recent study published in Pediatrics (Teague et al., Jan 2024) followed 13,256 trampoline-park injuries across 8.4 million jumper-hours. The data is sobering: the injury rate for high-performance jumping is 2.11 per 1,000 jumper-hours, and for foam pits, it is 1.91 per 1,000. For a busy park in the Taylor County region hosting hundreds of kids a day, these numbers mean a serious injury is a daily statistical probability.
Why ASTM F2970 and International Standards Matter
When a park in the Town of Trent tells you they are “safe,” we ask which standard they are following. The trampoline industry in the United States is largely self-regulated. The industry-authored standard, ASTM F2970, was written by the parks’ own peers to set a safety floor for design, maintenance, and staffing levels. However, ASTM F2970 is voluntary in Texas. While states like New York and New Jersey have mandated stricter oversight, Texas families are often left with only the operator’s internal SOPs as a guide.
We contrast this voluntary floor with EN ISO 23659:2022, the international standard adopted as the mandatory norm across Europe. This standard explicitly covers the design and operation of foam pits and airbags—the very features that most often fail children in Town of Trent parks. At our firm, we cite the binding international standard alongside ASTM F2970 to show that the floor the US industry operates on is one the rest of the developed world treats as a dangerous ceiling. Ralph Manginello and our legal team use these standards to prove that the park’s failure to enforce a one-jumper-per-bed rule or to maintain a foam pit to the correct depth is not just a mistake—it is a breach of the industry’s own duty of care.
The Waiver Architecture: Why It Is Not a Wall
The most common concern we hear from parents in the Town of Trent is: “I signed the waiver at the kiosk; can I still sue?” Our answer is almost always yes. A signature on an iPad does not grant a trampoline park immunity for gross negligence or the destruction of a child’s future.
In Texas, the Dresser Industries v. Page Petroleum (1993) doctrine requires that any waiver of future negligence be “conspicuous” and satisfy the “express negligence” rule. If the waiver you signed at an Abilene-area park didn’t clearly and boldly state that it covered the park’s own negligence, it may be legally void. Furthermore, the seminal Texas case Munoz v. II Jaz, Inc. (1993) established that a parent generally cannot sign away a minor child’s personal cause of action.
The park’s insurance adjuster may call you within 48 hours of an injury in the Town of Trent, using what we call “The Friendly Adjuster Call” tactic. They might offer a “Med-Pay” check of $3,000 to cover your emergency room co-pay. We warn you: do not deposit that check. The release on the back of that check is often a trap designed to end a multi-million-dollar case for the price of a single hospital visit. Our attorney Lupe Peña knows these scripts because he used to train the adjusters who use them. Whether your child was injured at a chain like Urban Air or at a neighbor’s backyard Jumpking in a Town of Trent neighborhood, the waiver is just noise. It is our job to silence it.
The Mechanisms of Catastrophe
We have spent decades studying the physics of rebound energy. Understanding how your child was hurt in the Town of Trent is the first step toward holding the right people accountable.
Double-Bounce Physics
The “double-bounce” is the signature mechanism of the trampoline park. When a 200-pound adult lands on the same trampoline bed that a 60-pound child is pushing off from, the energy transfer multiplies the child’s launch force by up to 4x. In Town of Trent backyard settings and commercial parks alike, this mechanism results in comminuted femoral shaft fractures and Salter-Harris growth plate injuries. Many parks in the Taylor County region violate ASTM F2970 ratio requirements, allowing mismatched age and weight groups to jump together on the same court.
Foam Pit Submerge-Entrapment
Foam pits are often the most dangerous attractions in the park. The mechanism of injury usually involves a head-first landing where the foam cubes have become compacted or the fill depth has dropped below the ASTM specification. This results in axial loading of the cervical spine—the same physics seen in diving accidents. We reference the case of Ty Thomasson (SkyPark Phoenix), who broke five vertebrae and died because the foam pit was only 2 feet 8 inches deep instead of the recommended 6 feet.
Harness and Coaster Failures
Modern “adventure parks” serving the Town of Trent have added attractions like the “Sky Rider” zipline or indoor climbing walls. These non-trampoline features are often the deadliest. In 2019, 12-year-old Matthew Lu died at an Altitude park because staff failed to properly secure his harness on a climbing wall over unpadded concrete. The park publicly admitted “human error” and removed the attraction—a corporate confession that we use as a pivot point for liability in similar cases.
The Rhabdomyolysis Bridge: Our Active $10M UH Case
A growing and under-reported category of injury following extended jumping at Town of Trent parks is exertional rhabdomyolysis. If your child jumps for 90 to 120 minutes in a hot, poorly ventilated facility and returns to the Town of Trent with dark “cola-colored” urine and extreme muscle pain, they may be in acute kidney failure.
At the Manginello Law Firm, we are currently litigating a $10 million lawsuit against the University of Houston involving rhabdomyolysis and acute kidney failure. The pathology and the medical expert requirements for that case are identical to what a child suffers after a grueling afternoon on the trampoline courts. We know the myoglobin cascade, we know the Creatine Kinase (CK) trajectory, and we know how to hold institutional defendants accountable for failing to provide hydration and rest protocols. While other firms are learning about rhabdo for the first time, we are already leading the litigation.
Liable Parties: Piercing the 5-Layer Stack
When we file a case for a Town of Trent family, we don’t just sue the local LLC. We perform corporate archeology to find the money. National chains are built on a 5-layer stack designed to shield the parent company:
- The Operator LLC: The local entity with a limited insurance policy.
- The Franchisee: The multi-unit owner group.
- The Franchisor: Entities like Sky Zone Franchising LLC or Urban Air Franchise Holdings.
- The Parent Corporation: Sky Zone, Inc. (renamed from CircusTrix in 2023) or Unleashed Brands.
- The Private Equity Sponsor: The firms like Palladium Equity or Seidler Equity that drive the cost-cutting decisions.
Our experience in the BP Texas City refinery litigation taught us how to pierce these layers. We know that the franchisor often retains control over the very safety manuals and monitor-training programs that failed your child in the Town of Trent. We follow the precedent of Damion Collins v. Urban Air, where a Kansas arbitrator awarded $15.6 million and held the franchisor (UATP Management LLC) responsible for 40% of the fault due to a “systemic failure” to implement safety changes.
Evidence Preservation: The 48-Hour Protocol
The evidence clock for a Town of Trent trampoline injury runs much faster than the legal statute of limitations. Park surveillance DVRs typically overwrite in as little as 7 to 30 days. Incident reports on digital systems like those used by national chains can be “revised” or “updated” within 48 hours of an injury. If a neighbor in the Town of Trent disposes of a defective Jumpking or Skywalker trampoline after a backyard fall, the manufacturing-defect claim may vanish with it.
We send comprehensive spoliation letters by certified mail within 24 hours of retention. We demand the preservation of:
- Multi-angle surveillance video (including the 24 hours before the incident to show staffing patterns).
- Individual training files for every court monitor on duty.
- Daily, weekly, and monthly inspection logs.
- The original incident report and all metadata showing subsequent edits.
- The kiosk waiver version history to confirm what was actually displayed to you.
Ralph Manginello and our investigators move faster than the park’s risk-management team. By the time they have assigned an adjuster, we have already begun the forensic extraction of the evidence that will win your case.
Specialized Damages for Pediatric Cases
A pediatric injury in the Town of Trent is not a “smaller version” of an adult injury. It is a disruption of a child’s entire development. When we calculate damages, we build a Pediatric Life-Care Plan that accounts for the next 70 years of your child’s life.
A Salter-Harris fracture at age nine is not just an ER bill; it is a decade of monitoring by a pediatric orthopedic surgeon to ensure the limb grows straight. A traumatic brain injury (TBI) in a developing brain requires educational consultants, neuropsychological testing throughout school, and a forensic economist to calculate the loss of future earning capacity. We have recovered multi-million dollar settlements for TBI and spinal cord victims precisely because we include the costs that other firms ignore: special education aides, home modifications, and the lifetime costs of post-splenectomy OPSI risks.
Why Choose Us for Your Town of Trent Case?
Most personal injury firms treat a trampoline case like a garden-variety slip-and-fall. They send a demand letter, wait for a settlement offer, and take their fee. That is not how we operate. We prepare every case for trial from Day 1 because we know that preparation is the only language insurance carriers respect.
With 25+ years of experience and three offices across Texas, our firm brings a level of technical and legal depth to Town of Trent cases that is unmatched. We advance all investigation costs—including the biomechanical engineers and pediatric specialists needed to prove your case. You pay nothing unless we win.
Hablamos Español. Nuestro abogado asociado Lupe Peña es hispanohablante nativo y representa a nuestros clientes directamente, sin intérpretes ni retrasos. Si su familia en Town of Trent se comunica mejor en español, nosotros cerramos esa brecha de inmediato.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I sue if I signed the trampoline park waiver in Town of Trent?
Yes. As we have discussed, waivers in Texas do not cover gross negligence, which is the conscious disregard of safety standards like ASTM F2970. Furthermore, under Munoz v. II Jaz, parents cannot waive a minor child’s right to sue for their own injuries. We run every waiver through a five-vector attack—conspicuousness, fair notice, parental indemnity, unconscionability, and scope. If the park failed to maintain its equipment or understaffed its courts, the waiver is not a wall.
Who is liable for a backyard trampoline injury in Town of Trent?
Backyard cases often involve multiple liable parties. The homeowner may be liable under the attractive nuisance doctrine if they failed to secure the trampoline from neighborhood children. The manufacturer (such as Jumpking or Skywalker) may face a product liability claim for a design or manufacturing defect, such as a frame weld failure. We also look at retailers like Walmart or Amazon under the “retailer-as-seller” doctrine if they distributed a product with known safety flaws or inadequate warnings.
How long do I have to file a trampoline lawsuit in Texas?
The standard statute of limitations for personal injury in Texas is two years from the date of the injury. For minors, the clock is tolled until their 18th birthday, giving them until age 20. However, the evidence in a Town of Trent park—especially surveillance video—often disappears within weeks. While you have time to file, you do not have time to wait for the investigation.
What is a “trampoline fracture”?
“Trampoline fracture” is a specific medical term (proximal tibial metaphyseal buckle fracture) that occurs in children aged two to five. It usually happens when a larger person jumps with a small child, causing the child’s bone to buckle under the transferred energy. This is a primary reason the AAP advises that children under six should never use trampolines. If a park in Town of Trent marketed “Toddler Time” to you and your three-year-old was double-bounced, the park violated clear pediatric medical consensus.
What if the park says my child caused their own accident?
Trampoline parks routinely try to blame children for “horseplay” or rule violations. However, in Texas and most jurisdictions, children under the age of seven are conclusively presumed incapable of negligence. Children aged seven to fourteen are rebuttably presumed incapable. Furthermore, the park cannot outsource its supervision duty to a child. If the monitor failed to intervene in a dangerous situation, the liability rests with the operator, not the victim.
How much does a trampoline injury lawyer cost?
We work on a contingency fee basis, which means there are zero upfront costs for your family. We only get paid if we recover money for you. We advance every expense—from filing fees to expert witness retainers—so that your child’s recovery fund stays intact while we fight for the maximum settlement possible.
The decisions made in the 72 hours following a trampoline injury determine the outcome of the next 72 years of a child’s life. If you are in the Town of Trent and your child has been hurt, do not let the park’s insurance adjuster dictate the narrative. You deserve an attorney who can quote ASTM F2970 from memory and who has spent decades making corporate conglomerates accountable for the lives they have altered.
What happened to your child wasn’t a “freak accident”—it was the predictable output of a system. Let us show you how to pierce that system.
Call 1-888-ATTY-911. Our team is available 24/7. Hablamos Español. No fee unless we win. The spoliation letter goes out within 24 hours of your call. The case starts today.
