“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 Hill, the mother of three-year-old Colton, describing the moment a trampoline park changed her family’s life forever. Colton’s femur—the strongest bone in the human body—snapped during a “Toddler Time” session that was supposed to be a safe environment for small children. As Kati told ABC News, “We had no idea. We would have never put our baby boy on a trampoline if we had known.”
We hear these stories far too often at Attorney911. Families in Helotes and across Bexar County visit places like Urban Air in San Antonio or Altitude Trampoline Park expecting safe family fun, only to leave in an ambulance headed for University Hospital or the Children’s Hospital of San Antonio. When your child is the one in the body cast, the trampoline park manager will point to the waiver you signed on a kiosk and tell you that there is nothing you can do.
They are wrong.
For over twenty-five years, Ralph Manginello and our team have held multi-billion-dollar corporations accountable. From the BP Texas City refinery litigation to our active $10 million lawsuit against the University of Houston involving rhabdomyolysis and acute kidney failure, we know how to dismantle the legal and corporate shields that chains like Sky Zone, Urban Air, and DEFY hide behind.
If your child was injured at a trampoline park serving Helotes or on a defective backyard trampoline in your neighborhood, you don’t need a lawyer who “handles accidents.” You need a firm that can quote ASTM F2970 attendant-to-jumper ratios from memory and knows exactly which clauses in a Texas waiver have been voided by the courts. We are built for this fight.
The Reality of Trampoline Injuries in Helotes and Beyond
Trampolines send more than 300,000 Americans to the emergency room every year. In a metro area like San Antonio, which serves Helotes families through a dense cluster of parks and a high concentration of suburban backyards, the number of families facing these catastrophic outcomes is measured in the thousands.
Since 1999, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has been warning parents that trampolines should not be used for recreational purposes at home. This position was reaffirmed in 2012 and updated again in 2019. Despite this, a massive industry has grown around the commercialization of this risk. In Texas, the industry consolidated rapidly. Sky Zone, Inc. (formerly known as CircusTrix LLC and backed by Palladium Equity Partners) now operates brands like Sky Zone, DEFY, and Rockin’ Jump as sister companies. Simultaneously, Seidler Equity Partners acquired Unleashed Brands, the parent company of Urban Air, in 2023.
These corporations operate on profit margins that frequently clash with safety requirements. In Harris County, a jury awarded $11.485 million against the operator of Cosmic Jump after a teenager fell through a torn trampoline slide onto bare concrete and suffered a traumatic brain injury. The jury found gross negligence—a conscious indifference to a known risk—even though the family had signed a waiver. At Attorney911, we believe what happened in that Houston courtroom is a warning to every operator in Helotes: a piece of paper is not a license to maim children.
The Physics of a Disaster: How Accidents Happen
Trampoline injuries are never truly “accidental.” They are the predictable outcome of physics combined with a failure to follow established safety standards.
The Double-Bounce Mechanism
The double-bounce is the most common cause of catastrophic lower-limb injuries. When a 200-pound adult lands on a trampoline bed at the same moment a 60-pound child is pushing off, the energy transfer multiplies the child’s launch force by up to four times. The child isn’t just jumping; they are being thrown with a force their developing musculoskeletal system cannot handle. This is why ASTM F2970 requires parks to separate jumpers by age and weight. When a park in Helotes fails to enforce this, they aren’t just being sloppy—they are conducting a dangerous experiment with your child’s safety.
Foam Pit Failures
Foam pits look like soft landing zones, but they are deceptively dangerous. If the foam blocks are compacted, or if there aren’t enough of them (violating the depth specifications in ASTM F2970), a child landing head-first can strike the hard floor beneath. This mechanism is the leading cause of cervical spinal cord injury and paralysis. The medical community has documented injuries like SCIWORA (Spinal Cord Injury Without Radiographic Abnormality), where a child suffers permanent nerve damage even when initial CT scans look normal.
The “Advanced Skills” Trap
Chains like Urban Air and Sky Zone often encourage children to attempt flips and somersaults into foam pits or airbags. However, the industry’s own safety standard, ASTM F2970-22, actually classifies these as “Advanced Skills” that should only be performed in designated zones under direct instructor supervision. On a crowded Saturday afternoon in San Antonio, those rules are almost never followed. A botched flip can lead to a vertebral artery dissection—a neurovascular injury that produces a spinal cord stroke. This was the mechanism in the viral case of Elle Yona, who was initially misdiagnosed with a panic attack before realizing she was paralyzed from a backflip into a foam pit.
Safety Standards: The Floor That Parks Fall Through
The commercial trampoline industry wrote its own safety standard, ASTM F2970, to establish a minimum bar for operation. Because it was written by the industry, it is a safety floor, not a ceiling. Even so, many parks fail to meet even these basic requirements.
- Attendant-to-Jumper Ratios: Parks are required to maintain specific ratios of court monitors to jumpers. Many Helotes-area parks cut these ratios during peak hours to save on labor costs.
- Training Requirements: ASTM requires annual safety and emergency preparedness training. In reality, many “court monitors” are sixteen-year-olds with less than four hours of training and no CPR or first aid certification.
- Daily Inspections: Parks must document daily pre-opening inspections. When we subpoena these logs, we often find they were signed off without the work being done, or that a known defect (like a torn mat or a missing spring pad) was ignored for weeks.
- International Comparisons: While the U.S. relies on voluntary standards, the International Organization for Standardization published EN ISO 23659:2022, which makes safety requirements mandatory across Europe. The U.S. industry, including chains like Sky Zone and Urban Air, continues to operate under a voluntary regime that favors the operator over the child.
Who is Liable for a Helotes Trampoline Injury?
One of the reasons families call Attorney911 is because they don’t know who to sue. The operator of a local jump park is often a single-location LLC that is intentionally undercapitalized. Our job is corporate archeology: we pierce the layers of the corporate shield to find the money.
- The Operator LLC: The immediate business running the facility.
- The Franchisee: The owner of multiple locations who manages daily staffing and training.
- The Franchisor: Entities like Sky Zone Franchising LLC or Urban Air Franchise Holdings that mandate the rules but often try to disclaim responsibility when something goes wrong.
- The Parent Company: Corporations like Unleashed Brands or Sky Zone, Inc. that are often backed by private equity money.
- Equipment Manufacturers: If a frame weld, a spring, or a protective net fails, companies like Jumpking, Skywalker, or Springfree may bear strict product liability.
- Retailers: Under recent rulings, major retailers like Walmart (who sells the Bouncepro private label) or Amazon (who sells Amazon Basics trampolines) can be held liable as “sellers” for defective products.
In an arbitration award against Urban Air in Overland Park, a father who was paralyzed on a “Wipe-Out” attraction was awarded $15.6 million. Significantly, the arbitrator found a “systemic failure” by the company and held the franchisor, UATP Management LLC, responsible for 40% of the award. We use this precedent to show Helotes families that the “we’re just the franchisor” defense does not work when we are in the room.
The Waiver: Why It Doesn’t End Your Case
If you signed an electronic waiver at a kiosk at a Bexar County jump park, don’t let that stop you from seeking justice. Texas law regarding waivers is complex, and our team includes an attorney, Lupe Peña, who used to defend these very companies. He knows exactly where the holes in their contracts are.
The Gross Negligence Carve-Out
Under Texas law, a waiver generally cannot release a defendant from claims of gross negligence. If the park knew of a dangerous condition and chose not to fix it to keep the registers ringing, the waiver is irrelevant. The $11.485 million Cosmic Jump verdict is the perfect example of this in action.
The Minor Child Rule
Texas courts have repeatedly held that a parent cannot bind a minor child to a pre-injury waiver for commercial activities. The landmark case Munoz v. II Jaz Inc. established that your signature can’t strip your child of their right to recover for their own injuries. While a 2025 Texas Supreme Court ruling in Cerna v. Pearland Urban Air made it easier for parks to force cases into arbitration, it did not change the underlying fact that the park is still responsible for the damage they cause.
The Language Barrier: The Delfingen Doctrine
If your family speaks Spanish as its primary language and you were handed an English-only waiver on an iPad at a busy counter, that waiver may be completely unenforceable. The Delfingen US-Texas v. Valenzuela ruling suggests that a contract is not valid if the signer could not understand the technical language being used. Lupe Peña speaks with our Spanish-speaking clients directly—no interpreters, no delays.
Catastrophic Injuries: The Lifelong Cost
A trampoline injury is rarely “just a broken bone.” Because children are still developing, the medical and economic stakes are enormous.
- Salter-Harris Fractures: These are injuries to the growth plate (physis). If a growth plate is destroyed at age seven, the bone may stop growing or grow crooked. This can require a decade of orthopedic monitoring, multiple corrective surgeries, and may result in permanent limb-length discrepancy.
- Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI): Developing brains are highly sensitive. A concussion on a trampoline court can lead to “second-impact syndrome,” which causes rapid and often fatal brain swelling if the child hits their head again before the first injury heals.
- Extremity Fractures and Compartment Syndrome: High-impact landings can cause bones to shatter. If the swelling is severe, it can cut off blood flow to the limb, a condition known as compartment syndrome. This is a surgical emergency that requires a fasciotomy to save the leg.
- Rhabdomyolysis and Acute Kidney Failure: This is a specialty of our firm. When a child jumps for ninety minutes in a hot, poorly ventilated indoor park without adequate hydration, their muscle tissue can literally begin to break down. This chemical breakdown releases myoglobin into the blood, which clogs the kidneys. We are currently litigating a $10 million hazing lawsuit involving this exact pathology. We know how to read the labs—the creatinine kinase (CK) levels and renal function markers—that most generalist lawyers would miss.
48-Hour Evidence Preservation: Why the Clock is Ticking
The most important work we do for a Helotes family happens in the first forty-eight hours after we are hired. Trampoline parks have a system for making evidence disappear.
- Surveillance Video: DVR systems at parks are often set to overwrite every 7 to 30 days. If you wait a month to call a lawyer, the video of the accident usually “doesn’t exist.”
- Incident Reports: Original incident reports are often revised or “sanitized” by managers after the fact. We subpoena the original digital metadata to see exactly what the monitor wrote before they were coached by corporate.
- Waiver Metadata: Kiosk databases can purge signature records on a 72-hour cycle.
- Staff Turnover: The annual turnover rate for trampoline park attendants can exceed 150%. The teenager who saw your child get hurt might not work there next week. We find them, we depose them, and we lock in their testimony before they disappear.
Our spoliation letters go out by certified mail and email within 24 hours of retention. We demand the preservation of the DVR hard drive, the training files of the monitors on duty, and the maintenance logs of the specific attraction. We don’t wait for the park to “check their files.” We move faster than their delete button.
Calculating Your Child’s Recovery: The Life-Care Plan
We don’t settle for the hospital bills you’ve already received. In a pediatric catastrophic injury case, the real cost is what the next seventy years will look like. We work with a network of experts to build a Professional Life-Care Plan:
- Certified Life Care Planners: To itemize every future doctor’s visit, surgery, and therapy session.
- Pediatric Orthopedic Surgeons: To project the growth-plate prognosis over the next decade.
- Forensic Economists: To calculate the loss of future earning capacity if the injury limits your child’s career options as an adult.
- Biomechanical Engineers: To reconstruct the accident and prove that the park’s equipment or staffing failed.
You pay nothing for these experts upfront. We advance every cost ourselves. If we don’t win your case, you owe us nothing.
Frequently Asked Questions for Helotes Families
Can I sue if the park says it is “at my own risk”?
“Assumption of risk” only covers the inherent risks of jumping, like a mild sprain. It does not cover the park’s failure to maintain equipment, train its staff, or enforce its own safety rules. A park that operates below the ASTM F2970 standard cannot hide behind an “own risk” defense.
What if the injury happened at a neighbor’s house in Helotes?
In backyard cases, we look at the “attractive nuisance” doctrine. Texas law considers a trampoline an attraction that is likely to lure a child into danger. We analyze the homeowner’s insurance policy—though many have exclusions—and the manufacturer’s product liability. If a Jumpking or Skywalker trampoline failed due to a design flaw or a UV-degraded net, the manufacturer may be the primary defendant.
How much does a trampoline park lawyer cost?
We work on a 100% contingency fee basis. This means we only get paid if we recover money for you. We advance the costs for the investigators and medical experts so that your family can focus on recovery without financial stress.
Should I talk to the park’s insurance adjuster?
No. The “friendly adjuster call” is a tactic designed to get you to say something that suggests your child was “horseplaying” or “not following rules.” They want to record you saying the injury doesn’t seem that bad. Lupe Peña used to train these adjusters; he knows their script. Have them call us instead.
What should I do if my child has dark urine after jumping?
Go to the emergency room immediately. This is a primary indicator of rhabdomyolysis and acute kidney failure. Do not wait for a pediatrician appointment. The first 48 hours are critical for saving kidney function. After the child is stabilized, call us to preserve the evidence of the heat and exertion levels at the park.
Why Choose the Manginello Law Firm?
When you call 1-888-ATTY-911, you aren’t just getting an attorney; you’re getting twenty-five years of federal-court muscle and insurance-industry intelligence. Ralph Manginello has gone head-to-head with some of the largest corporations in the world, including BP and Walmart. Our firm has achieved multi-million dollar results for traumatic brain injuries and spinal cord injuries.
We represent families, not files. We know that if you are reading this, you are likely in a hospital room or sitting at your kitchen table wondering if things will ever be “normal” again. We can’t change the moment your child hit the mat, but we can change what happens next.
What happened to your child at an Urban Air or a backyard trampoline in Helotes wasn’t an accident—it was the result of a system that prioritized speed and volume over safety. The park’s legal team is already working to protect their investment. We are here to protect yours.
Call 1-888-ATTY-911. We are available 24/7. Hablamos Español. Our consultation is free, and we advance all costs of the case. Your child deserves a firm that fights harder than the park defends.
