This California skydiving center’s death toll just hit 25. How many more must die?
Yet another fatal accident occurred at the Skydive Lodi Parachute Center on Saturday, and owner Bill Dause is again shrugging off responsibility. Sabrina Call, a 57-year-old Watsonville resident, was the facility’s 25th death since 1981.
How many more people must die before this deadly operation shuts down?
The San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office said “it appeared that the woman’s primary parachute and her backup parachute had tangled together,” The Sacramento Bee’s Vincent Moleski reported. Call was an experienced skydiver with about 2,000 jumps recorded.
Talking to reporters on Monday, Dause tried to skirt accountability. He attributed the pattern of deaths at his facility to skydiving simply being “a high-risk activity.”
“Dause said he did not know whether Call packed her own parachute Saturday, though with her amount of experience she would have known how to do so,” The Bee’s Michael McGough reported. “But an employee at Skydive Lodi interjected that her equipment was packed by a contract parachute rigger.”
The incident is the latest in four decades of accidents, lawsuits and turmoil surrounding the Acampo business. Saturday’s death occurred exactly one month after a judge ordered Dause to pay over $40 million to the family of 18-year-old Tyler Turner, a Los Banos teen killed in a 2016 tandem parachute accident. The instructor who died with Turner was not fully certified.
The United States Parachute Association, the only federally recognized organization that licenses skydivers, investigated the Lodi facility after the accident. Twenty instructors were suspended and 120 others were told they required more training. The two people blamed for the accident are now squaring off in a federal lawsuit. Court filings revealed a reckless operation where trainers cut corners and allegedly forged signatures to authorize jumps.
Unfortunately, the Federal Aviation Administration says it lacks the authority to close the business. An agency spokesperson said on Monday that their investigations are “limited to inspecting the packing of the parachute, reserve parachute, and rules of flight for the pilot and aircraft.” The FAA threatened to levy fines in 2016 for aircraft citations but they were never issued after the inquiry was passed off to federal prosecutors.
Skydive Lodi Parachute Center shares the runways with the Lodi Airport off of Highway 99, however, it’s a private business and operates out of a separate building. The FAA has evicted skydiving businesses in Myrtle Beach, S.C., and Tecumseh, Mich. over safety issues, but the FAA says those operations were subject to direct government oversight because of where they were housed.
Before the fallout of the 2016 double fatality, Dause and the Lodi area facility had largely escaped any meaningful accountability. Even today, Skydive Lodi enjoys high ratings on Yelp and Google despite its disturbing history of fatal falls.
When asked on Monday how he can stay open even with mounting debts and legal troubles, Dause expressed amusement.
“‘That’s kind of a hard question to answer if you’re not dedicated to the activity you’re doing,’ Dause said with a chuckle, before claiming news media were blowing the incidents at the parachute center out of proportion,” wrote McGough.
There are 23 skydiving centers in California that the parachute association considers safe. Lodi is not one of them. Skydiving is statistically safer than riding a bike or driving a car. There’s no way to justify a death toll this high.
If paying the massive legal penalty won’t close this place down, maybe skydivers should take their money to places where they are less likely to have their death shrugged off by Bill Dause.
This story was originally published April 20, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "This California skydiving center’s death toll just hit 25. How many more must die?."