Bungee jumper reportedly leaped to her death after mishearing instructor
A bungee jumper reportedly misunderstood her instructor – a heart-stopping mistake that led to her death.
Yecenia Morales Gómez leaped off a bridge and fell roughly 150 feet because her harness and bungee cord weren’t attached yet.
The 25-year-old and her boyfriend went to Sky Bungee Jumping Amaga in northern Colombia in July of last year for their first bungee jumping experience.
Gómez heard an instructor saying to jump and believed it was directed toward her when it was actually for her boyfriend, according to local reports.
“She got confused,” Gustavo Guzmán, the mayor of the municipality of Fredonia, Antioquia, told El Tiempo. “The signal was for the boyfriend to jump because he was already attached to the security equipment. They had only put the harness on her so she got confused and rushed.”
She was pronounced dead on the scene, despite her partner’s attempts to save her by performing CPR. Medical reports said she died of cardiac arrest during the fall.
Despite reports that Gómez confused commands, Sky Bungee claimed during investigations that it wasn’t true — and that there was no one else bungee jumping at the same time as her.
“It is not true, as reported, that Yecenia Morales Gómez’s jump was due to the confusion of a jump command given to her friend,” the company said in a statement. “At the time of the accident, nobody jumped, neither her boyfriend nor anyone else.”
“Our protocol is designed for single jumps and with only one person per jump. It means that in order to jump a person must finish everything related to the previous person’s jump,” the statement continued.
The company noted that a viral video of the incident shows a person who had jumped earlier being recovered, claiming that there’s no possibility of any confusion.
Sky Bungee said they are cooperating with investigations and handed over documentation of their activities.
Gómez’s brother Andrés Morales remembers her as an entrepreneurial woman who loved to read and dance.
“My sister is a girl with all the best values, happy, spontaneous, with virtues that made her love her friends, and helped the people in need,” Morales said.
