Skydiving Instructor Sent To Prison After Multiple Deaths At Site

Originally, Pooley was a licensed instructor at this center, but his license was suspended in 2015. However, he continued fraudulently conducting skydiving lessons, teaching over 100 instructors, including the one whose 2016 jump led to his death. Now, the disgraced Pooley has been sentenced to two years in prison.

Just how was Pooley able to continue teaching instructors after his license was revoked? In short, the Lodi Parachute Center uses digital signatures for instructors, and Pooley used the signature of another instructor who was still certified.

That allowed him to continue training skydiving instructors at the center which has become somewhat notorious due to it having 28 deaths since 1985.

This fraudulent behavior ended up being quite lucrative for Robert Pooley: he typically charged these instructors $1,100 for each course, and he trained over 100 instructors after his license was suspended.

That means, at the bare minimum, he earned over $100,000 with fraudulent skydiving lessons, though his crimes didn’t receive true scrutiny until some grisly skydiving deaths.

One of the people Pooley trained was Yong Kwon, someone who was later paired with Tyler Turner, a first-timer who wanted to do a tandem jump.

During the jump, Kwon was unable to open either the primary or reserve parachutes, and both men died on impact. Pooley was not charged for their deaths, but Turner’s family filed a wrongful death civil suit against drop zone owner William Dause that resulted in Turner’s family receiving a $40 million judgment in their favor.

Unfortunately, the case of Robert Pooley’s fraudulent training is only one major incident for a skydiving center that has experienced far too many deaths in the last few decades.

Pooley was certainly symptomatic of a problem, but his arrest and imprisonment seem to have done very little to keep visitors to the Lodi Parachute Center safe. In fact, just this past August, Devrey LaRiccia Chase and student Kayla Black died from a tandem jump, the same kind that Pooley fraudulently continued to teach after his license was pulled.

For many of us, tales of these skydiving deaths are like a nightmare come true: jumping like this has always been frightening for those with a healthy fear of heights, and the only possible comfort came from the idea that trained skydiving instructors can keep you safe.

The appalling case of Robert Pooley, though, provides grim proof that people may be trusting frauds with their very lives and paying the ultimate price. 

All of this is enough to make us want to visit Mars…should we do a bad job of jumping out of the shuttle in the depths of space, at least the zero-gravity vacuum will keep us from a fatal impact. 

Source: SFGate