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The World’s Tallest Water Slide Was a Terrible, Tragic Idea

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A water park co-owner sketched the world’s tallest slide on a whim — and it killed a state lawmaker’s son two years later.

Verrückt opened at Schlitterbahn Waterpark in Kansas City, Kansas, in 2014 as a marketing stunt built for a cable TV show. It became the tallest water slide on Earth, taller than Niagara Falls, and it sent riders down a 17-story drop at 70 miles per hour. On August 7, 2016, it killed 10-year-old Caleb Schwab, son of Kansas state representative Scott Schwab, and the reasons why are laid out in The Atlantic’s video documentary “The World’s Tallest Water Slide Was a Terrible, Tragic Idea.”

• Verrückt stood 168 feet 7 inches tall and was designed through trial-and-error testing rather than standard engineering models — neither co-owner Jeff Henry nor lead designer John Schooley was a licensed engineer.
• On August 7, 2016, Caleb Schwab was decapitated after his raft went airborne and struck a metal support hoop on the ride’s overhead netting; two adult women in the raft suffered severe facial and head injuries.
• Kansas law at the time let amusement parks self-inspect, and at least 13 riders had already been hurt hitting the netting before Schwab’s death; in March 2018 a grand jury indicted Schlitterbahn, Henry, Schooley, and former operations director Tyler Austin Miles on charges including second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter.

Built for a TV Show, Not a Safety Code

Verrückt wasn’t the product of years of ride-engineering research. According to the documentary, Jeff Henry conceived it on impulse for the Travel Channel’s “Xtreme Waterparks,” and he pushed it into production with Schooley as lead designer. The pair wanted a slide that could out-do every other water park on television, and they got it: a 168-foot-7-inch tower with an opening drop steep enough to push three-person rafts to 70 mph before they even hit the first crest.

The problem was how they got there. Instead of running the drop through standard physics and mathematical modeling the way licensed structural and mechanical engineers do, Henry and Schooley essentially guessed and adjusted. Early test runs used sandbag-loaded rafts, and those rafts kept flying off the track’s second hump instead of staying on it. The fix wasn’t a redesign of the slide’s geometry — it was bolting an overhead netting system, held up by rigid metal hoops, above the section where rafts kept launching.

The Day the Netting Failed

On August 7, 2016, Caleb Schwab climbed into a raft with two adult women for a ride down Verrückt. The raft went airborne at the same second crest that had launched test rafts for years. Schwab’s head struck one of the metal hoops supporting the netting, and he was decapitated; both women in the raft with him suffered severe facial and head injuries.

Neither Jeff Henry nor John Schooley was a licensed engineer.

The netting that was supposed to be the safety fix for a known launching problem instead became the thing that killed a 10-year-old. It wasn’t the first sign of trouble, either — at least 13 riders before Schwab had already been injured hitting that same netting.

Key Investigation Findings Revealed

Kansas law at the time allowed amusement parks to inspect their own rides, meaning Verrückt never faced an outside safety review despite years of documented launching incidents. After Schwab’s death, Kansas lawmakers repealed that self-inspection exemption and mandated state inspections of amusement rides going forward.

In 2017, the Schwab family reached a settlement with Schlitterbahn and associated parties worth roughly $20 million. Then, in March 2018, a Kansas grand jury went further, indicting Schlitterbahn as a company along with Henry, Schooley, and former operations director Tyler Austin Miles on criminal charges including second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter. Prosecutors alleged the men knew about the ride’s design flaws and safety warnings and rushed it open anyway.

Reckoning With Impulse Engineering

Verrückt’s story sits alongside other cautionary accounts of ambition outrunning oversight — the same pattern that shows up in accounts of dangerous natural extremes people underestimate, or in near-misses like the teenager who nearly fell into a massive sinkhole. In Verrückt’s case, the danger wasn’t hidden underground — it was built in plain sight, marketed as a thrill, and ridden by thousands before anyone paid the price Caleb Schwab did.

Schlitterbahn dismantled Verrückt in November 2018, more than two years after Schwab’s death, closing out the ride’s run permanently rather than attempting any redesign.