Imagine a Saturday afternoon in University Park. Your family is transitioning from a morning soccer match at Curtis Park or perhaps a youth clinic near the SMU campus. You decide to reward the kids with a trip to one of the nearby trampoline parks in North Dallas, Frisco, or Grapevine. You stand at the kiosk, the line behind you is long, and you quickly tap “I agree” on a digital waiver so the kids can start jumping. Twenty minutes later, you hear it—the sound that stops every parent’s heart.
As Kati Hill told ABC News after her three-year-old son Colton broke his femur at a park, it is “the worst scream that you could ever have heard from a child.” In an instant, a fun family outing has turned into a nightmare of sirens, trauma bays at Children’s Medical Center Dallas, and a surgeon explaining what happens when a growth plate is destroyed at age nine.
We are Attorney911. Since 1998, Ralph Manginello has fought for catastrophic injury victims against the world’s largest corporations. We didn’t build our firm to handle “slip and falls.” We built it to take on Fortune 500 defendants like BP, Walmart, and Amazon. Now, we are bringing that same aggressive, evidence-first architecture to represent families in University Park whose lives have been upended by the systemic negligence of the trampoline park industry.
If you are reading this while sitting at your child’s bedside, we have one thing to tell you above all else: this is not your fault. You signed the waiver because the park told you it was a “sign-in sheet.” You let them jump because the park marketed itself as “the safest family fun in Texas.” But the park knew things you didn’t. They knew that their foam pits were compacted, their attendants were undertrained, and their courts were dangerously overcrowded.
We know how to hold them accountable. With 25+ years of experience and a legal team that includes a former insurance defense attorney who used to write the very waivers these parks rely on, we pierce the corporate shields and get to the truth.
The Reality of the Risk: Why Trampoline Injuries Are Never “Accidents”
The trampoline park industry in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex is saturated. With chains like Urban Air headquartered in Grapevine and Altitude Trampoline Park based right here in Dallas, our region is the epicenter of the “Family Entertainment Center” pivot. These parks are no longer just rooms full of trampolines. They are high-throughput industrial facilities that bolt on go-karts, indoor coasters like the Sky Rider, and climbing walls—all supervised by minimum-wage teenagers with an average of two to four hours of training.
What happened to your child wasn’t a freak accident. It was the predictable output of a business model that prioritizes margin over safety.
The Physics of the Double-Bounce
One of the most frequent mechanisms we see in University Park cases is the “double-bounce.” If you were watching your child on a court in North Dallas and saw a 200-pound adult land on the same trampoline bed while your 60-pound child was pushing off, you witnessed a laws-of-physics catastrophe. When the energy transfers through the bed, the smaller child is launched with force multiplied by up to 4x.
ASTM F2970—the safety standard written by the trampoline industry itself—requires parks to enforce weight-class separation. When a park ignores this rule to pack more jumpers onto a court, they aren’t just being “sloppy.” They are consciously disregarding a known high-risk mechanism. This is what Texas law calls gross negligence, and as the $11.485 million Menchaca v. Cosmic Jump verdict in Harris County proved, gross negligence defeats a signed waiver every time.
The Foam Pit Illusion
Foam pits look soft, but they are often the most dangerous attraction in the building. As Eager’s 2012 biomechanics research and the 2024 Pediatrics study by Teague et al. have documented, foam pits carry an injury rate of 1.91 per 1,000 jumpers—significantly higher than open jumping.
When foam cubes aren’t rotated or replaced, they compact. A child diving into a foso can “bottom out” and strike the concrete floor beneath. This axial loading is the mechanism behind cervical spine injuries and the terrifying pediatric phenomenon known as SCIWORA—Spinal Cord Injury Without Radiographic Abnormality. A child can have a “normal” CT scan in the ER and still be suffering from permanent cord ischemia because their ligamentous spine is more flexible than an adult’s. We work with pediatric neurologists who understand these nuances and know that a “normal” scan doesn’t always mean a child is safe.
The Texas Legal Landscape: Why Your Waiver Is Not a Wall
If you live in University Park, you are subject to the specific, often complex requirements of Texas tort law. The insurance adjuster who called you 48 hours after the injury probably told you that the waiver you signed ends your case. They are counting on you not knowing the “fair notice” doctrine or the protections Texas law affords to minors.
The Munoz Rule: Protecting Our Children
Since the 1993 decision in Munoz v. II Jaz, Inc., Texas law has been clear: a parent cannot pre-emptively waive a minor child’s own personal injury claim. Your signature at that kiosk may bar your claims for medical expenses you’ve paid, but it does not extinguish your child’s right to seek justice for their own pain, suffering, and permanent impairment. We use this doctrine as our primary hammer in every pediatric case.
The Dresser Fair Notice Doctrine
Texas courts require waivers of negligence to be “conspicuous.” Under Dresser Industries v. Page Petroleum, the release must use the specific word “negligence” and must be printed in a way that attracts the attention of a reasonable person—using bold, all-caps, or contrasting colors. Most digital kiosk waivers used in DFW parks are buried in twenty screens of legalese. If the waiver wasn’t conspicuous, it isn’t enforceable.
The Bilingual Formation Attack (Delfingen)
Many families in Dallas and the surrounding areas are bilingual. If your primary language is Spanish and the park handed you an English-only waiver on an iPad while a teenage attendant pressured you to “sign quickly so the kids can jump,” you may not have formed a valid contract. Our associate attorney Lupe Peña is a native Spanish speaker who uses the Delfingen US-Texas v. Valenzuela doctrine to invalidate waivers signed under procedural unconscionability. Hablamos Español. Llame al 1-888-ATTY-911.
The Corporate Archeology: Piercing the Five-Layer Stack
When we sue a park like Sky Zone or Urban Air, we don’t just sue the local LLC. We perform what we call “corporate archeology.” These chains are engineered to hide the money upstream. The local operator is usually undercapitalized with a $1 million policy that won’t even cover the first six months of a spinal cord injury’s life-care plan.
We go further. We identify the franchisee, the franchisor (like UATP Management LLC), and the corporate parent (Sky Zone, Inc., formerly CircusTrix LLC). We even look at the private equity sponsors like Palladium Equity Partners or Seidler Equity Partners. We have seen how these PE firms approve cost-cutting measures—like reducing the number of attendants per court—to hit margin targets. When a corporate decision made in a boardroom in Grapevine or Dallas results in a broken neck on a trampoline court, we hold the decision-makers accountable.
As proven in the 2023 Damion Collins v. Urban Air arbitration, a franchisor can be held liable for a “systemic failure” to implement safety changes. That case resulted in a $15.6 million award, with the franchisor absorbing 40% of the fault. We bring that same level of corporate scrutiny to every University Park case we handle.
Medical Specificity: We Understand the Trauma
A “broken leg” is a generic term used by insurance adjusters to minimize your child’s trauma. We don’t use it. We speak the language of orthopedic surgeons and neurologists because we know that accuracy drives damages.
Salter-Harris Fractures
If your child suffered a distal tibia fracture, they likely have a Salter-Harris injury. Because children’s bones are still growing, a break through the physis (growth plate) is a long-term medical event. A Salter-Harris Type II fracture at age eight may not show its true damage until age fourteen, when one leg ends up measurably shorter than the other. We don’t settle cases while growth plates are still active without a life-care plan that accounts for a decade of orthopedic monitoring and possible corrective osteotomy.
The Rhabdomyolysis Bridge
We are currently litigating a $10 million lawsuit against the University of Houston regarding rhabdomyolysis and acute kidney failure. This is the same pathology we see in children who spend two hours jumping in a hot indoor park without proper hydration. When muscles break down from extreme exertion, myoglobin spills into the blood and can shut down the kidneys. If your child had cola-colored urine or rock-hard muscle pain within 48 hours of a park visit, you are dealing with a medical emergency that we know how to document and litigate.
Vertebral Artery Dissection
The 2024 viral case of Elle Yona—viewed over 27 million times on TikTok—highlighted a mechanism the industry tries to hide: the spinal-cord stroke. A backflip into a foam pit can torque the vertebrae enough to tear the artery, leading to C4 incomplete quadriplegia. These injuries are frequently misdiagnosed as panic attacks in the ER. We work with imaging experts who can identify the “vertebral artery flow void” on an MRI, providing the scientific proof your case needs.
The 48-Hour Evidence Protocol: Why You Must Act Now
The most dangerous thing you can do for your child’s case is wait. Evidence at a trampoline park has an incredibly short shelf life.
- Surveillance Footage: Most DFW parks use DVR systems that overwrite every 7 to 30 days. If we don’t send a formal spoliation letter immediately, the video of the double-bounce or the attendant being on their phone will be gone forever.
- Kiosk Metadata: Kiosk databases purge version history on cycles as short as 72 hours. We need to capture what waiver version was live the moment you tapped the screen.
- The “Glitch” Defense: In a recent Georgia case (Mathew Knight), a park produced video that happened to “glitch” on four separate cameras at the exact moment of injury. The jury wasn’t fooled—they awarded $3.5 million because the spoliation suggested a cover-up.
- Staff Turnover: Trampoline park attendants turn over at a rate of 130-150% annually. The teenager who saw what happened might be working at a different job in a different city next month. We use our ex-employee outreach network to find these witnesses through LinkedIn alumni and state labor records before they disappear.
Our spoliation letters go out via certified mail within 24 hours of being retained. We don’t just “gather evidence”—we use forensic acquisition tools to image DVR hard drives and recover Microsoft 365 incident-report metadata.
Why Choose Attorney911 for Your University Park Case?
You have plenty of options for a “personal injury lawyer” in Dallas. But trampoline cases are a specialty field that requires a specific armory of experts and data.
- Internal Knowledge: One of our attorneys used to be on the other side. He knows exactly which arguments the park’s insurer will use because he used to write them. He knows which “independent” medical examiners (IMEs) are paid to write minimization reports. We neutralize them.
- Expert Moat: We don’t just “hire experts.” We have standing relationships with biomechanical engineers who model energy transfer, pediatric life-care planners who calculate the cost of medical care for the next 70 years, and ASTM-compliance specialists who have memorized F2970.
- The “Family” Approach: As our client Chad Harris said, “You are NOT just some client… You are FAMILY to them.” We represent the parent who is overwhelmed. We take the calls from the insurance adjuster so you can focus on the physical therapy appointments.
- Contingency Discipline: We advance 100% of the investigation and expert costs. If we don’t recover money for your family, you owe us nothing. Your child’s recovery fund remains intact.
- Federal Experience: Our managing partner, Ralph Manginello, is admitted to the Southern District of Texas. We manage complex, multi-defendant litigation daily. Whether the park is in University Park or halfway across the country, we have the reach to win.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I sue if I signed the waiver at the park?
Yes. In Texas, a parent generally cannot sign away a minor child’s right to sue for personal injuries. Additionally, no waiver in the United States protects a park from gross negligence or reckless conduct. If the park violated its own safety rules or ASTM standards, the waiver is often legally irrelevant to the final outcome.
What is a “double-bounce” and why is it dangerous?
A double-bounce occurs when a heavier person (usually an adult) lands on the trampoline at the same time a smaller person (your child) is pushing off. The kinetic energy transfers through the bed and launches the smaller child with up to 4x the force of a normal jump. This is the #1 cause of shattered femurs and growth-plate fractures at parks.
The park’s insurance company offered us a “medical payment” check. Should I take it?
Do NOT sign or deposit anything without a lawyer’s review. These checks, often for $3,000 to $5,000, are frequently “Med-Pay” Trojan horses. The back of the check or the accompanying fine print may contain a full release of all future claims. By cashing it, you could be ending a million-dollar case for a few thousand dollars.
How much is my child’s trampoline injury case worth?
Every case is unique, but we look at the lifetime impact. A Salter-Harris growth plate fracture at age nine involves a decade of monitoring and potentially corrective surgery, anchoring damages in the $500K to $2M range. Catastrophic spinal or brain injuries often result in life-care plans exceeding $10 million. We use forensic economists to calculate the true present value of your child’s future needs.
How long do I have to sue a trampoline park in Texas?
The statute of limitations for personal injury is two years. For minors, the clock is “tolled” until they turn eighteen, giving them until age twenty. However, you should never wait. Essential evidence, like surveillance video, is destroyed by the park within weeks. A case that is filed too late has no evidence to support it.
The Case Starts Today
The clock on your child’s case isn’t running tomorrow—it’s running right now. While you are at the doctor’s office, the park is already rotating its foam, replacing its broken springs, and letting its DVR overwrite the footage of what actually happened.
What happened to your child at an Urban Air, Sky Zone, or Altitude park wasn’t an “inherent risk.” It was a failure of a system designed by corporate parents who put margin ahead of safety. They have risk-management teams, insurance adjusters, and law firms already working to close your file. You deserve a team that pushes back harder.
Call 1-888-ATTY-911 (1-888-288-9911). We answer 24/7. Hablamos Español. No fee unless we win. Our spoliation letter goes out within 24 hours of your call. We represent families in University Park, across the DFW metroplex, and nationwide.
Don’t let them push your family around with a kiosk waiver. Let’s build your child’s future together.
1-888-ATTY-911
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