Tragic moment boy tells parents his brother was decapitated on ‘world’s tallest water slide’

Caleb Schwab’s older brother had gone down the slide just before him

A 10-year-old boy died on the ‘world’s tallest water slide’ almost a decade ago and it was his brother who had to tell their parents what had happened.

The Schwab family had gone to the Schlitterbahn Waterpark in Kansas City on 7 August 2016, and one of the rides there was called the Verrückt (meaning ‘crazy’ or ‘insane’ in German) which stood at 51 meters high.

Those on the slide would board a raft and be plunged down a near-vertical drop before going up and over an incline and coming back down at the end of the ride.

Parents Scott and Michelle Schwab and their four sons went to the waterpark that day, and they’d told their kids that ‘brothers stick together’.

12-year-old Nathan and 10-year-old Caleb went on Verrückt, with Nathan going down first and waiting at the bottom for his brother when tragedy struck and cost Caleb his life.

Speaking to Good Morning America in the aftermath of the tragedy, Michelle said that Nathan was screaming ‘He flew from Verrückt, he flew Verrückt’, and when she tried to run closer someone stopped her and told her she really didn’t want to see what had happened.

“He just kept saying, ‘No, trust me, you don’t want to go any further’,” she recounted.

Caleb had been found dead in the pool at the bottom of the slide, the boy had been decapitated.

Scott said he remembered asking someone else for confirmation, saying: “I just need to hear you say it. Is my son dead?”

The father said it was ‘surreal’ and that he didn’t even remember driving home that day after learning that his 10-year-old son had died.

While the waterpark reopened three days after Caleb’s death, Verrückt did not reopen and was demolished in 2018.

The ride never reopened after Caleb’s death and it was eventually torn down, the waterpark itself later followed (The Atlantic)

The waterpark itself did not open the following year for the 2019 season and plans for a redevelopment of the area resulted in the place being demolished.

A 2019 documentary investigating the disaster found that there had been safety concerns about the Verrückt before the ride opened.

“There wasn’t a lot of science or ride engineering involved in the testing and design,” The Water Slide documentary maker Nathan Truesdell said.

“They were sending sandbags down and basically hoping that they didn’t fly off of the slide. The netting that ultimately ended up killing the child was added to prevent the rafts from flying off of the slide completely.”