A dramatic incident unfolded this week at a Texas carnival near Beaumont when a ride malfunctioned, leaving a child in peril.
Groves Pecan Festival was held for the 54th year from October 12-15, free to attend and boasting an array of craft and food vendors, a beer garden, live entertainment, and rides like the Bullet.
This ride, also referred to as the Roll-O-Plane, has enclosed cars that are fixed to opposite ends of a rotating arm. Riders are never inverted because the cars twist horizontally as they are propelled through the air to make a loop.
While a ride in the Bullet can be seen as a classic carnival thrill, things took a truly frightening turn on the final day of the festival when the apparatus malfunctioned. A ride operator had been helping secure a 12-year-old girl inside one of the cars when a gust of wind suddenly propelled it into motion.
The car door remained open, risking the girl slipping out.
Seeing this, the operator held on to the car as it lifted him 30 feet into the air and used his foot to keep the door shut.
“It started going slow at first and he was trying to stop it. Her door wasn’t closed. So I started freaking out,” explained Caress Muraira, the young girl’s mother, according to Fox 4 KDFW.
As seen in a video captured by a bystander named Eric McCauley, the worker heroically clung to the side of the car, ensuring the child’s safety until the ride could be brought back down.
The ride was shut down for the rest of the day due to the mishap.
As recalled by Muraira, her daughter remained relatively calm during those few minutes of uncertainty, which to the mother felt like an eternity. The girl reassured not only the ride operator — encouraging him to hold on and not fall — but also her panicking mother.
“She kept telling me, ‘Mommy I’m OK, I just want to let you know I’m OK,’” Muraira said.
The Bullet was unluckily the young girl’s first ride at the festival that day.
“We just wanted to have a little fun, you know, a family day,” Muraira recalled.
