Case of two Schlitterbahn workers accused of lying to investigators headed to jury

Jurors will begin deliberations Thursday on the fate of John Zalsman and David Hughes, two Schlitterbahn maintenance workers accused of obstructing the investigation of Caleb Schwab’s death on the Verruckt water slide in 2016.

Both the prosecution and the defense rested their cases after a second full day of testimony on Wednesday in Wyandotte County District Court.

Verruckt was a 17-story water slide in Kansas City, Kan., that took a raft carrying three riders on a steep descent before climbing a 50-foot hump and eventually coming to rest in a pool of water.

Hughes and Zalsman were charged in May with lying to investigators during separate interviews in 2017. Both men are accused of telling investigators that a brake mat on the ascent of the hump had only been on the slide during testing phases, when video evidence indicates that the mat was in place at times when it was open to customers.

Jurors were told the brake mat, which was believed to slow down a raft as it reached the top of the hump, had come off the slide less than two weeks before 10-year-old Caleb was killed on the slide.

Caleb died on Aug. 7, 2016, when his raft went airborne on the hump of Verruckt and he collided with a metal pole that supported a net meant to keep riders from flying off the side.

The key witness on Wednesday for the Kansas Attorney General’s office, which is prosecuting the Schlitterbahn case, was Kansas Bureau of Investigation senior special agent Jason Diaz, who interviewed Zalsman and Hughes.

Prosecutors played an audio recording of that interview, which both men granted voluntarily and without their own attorneys present.

Hughes, who spoke to investigators on June 7, 2017, around his kitchen table at his home in Basehor, can be heard telling the KBI investigators that the brake mat was not on the slide while it was in operation.

“There was one there during testing but there wasn’t during operation,” Hughes said in the recording.

Zalsman, who spoke to investigators at a pancake restaurant near Schlitterbahn two days later, was asked if the brake pad was in place during operation of the slide, to which Zalsman replied no.

Prosecutors presented screen grabs from videos of Verruckt that showed that a brake pad was in the middle of the slide during the 2016 season.

Defense attorneys pushed back on Diaz’s testimony and interview methods, pointing out that another maintenance worker, Willard Kampmeier, interviewed by Diaz initially said the brake pad wasn’t in place during operation of the slide. When KBI agents showed Kampmeier a photo showing that the brake pad existed, Kampmeier eventually conceded that the pad had been in place while the slide was open to customers.

Chris Joseph, attorney for Zalsman, asked Diaz why investigators did not go back and show Hughes or Zalsman the same screen grab that was shown to Kampmeier.

“At that point, we were preparing for the grand jury,” Diaz replied.

Joseph pointed out that the grand jury did not meet until about nine months after Zalsman and Hughes were interviewed.

Joseph also quizzed Diaz about another Schlitterbahn employee who gave statements to investigators that later turned out to not be true, and yet was not charged like Zalsman and Hughes.

Diaz said he did not believe the other employee was intentionally misleading him.

After testimony concluded, attorneys for Zalsman and Hughes asked Judge Robert Burns to acquit their clients. They argued that the Kansas Attorney General had not met the elements for a felony charge and, in the case of Hughes, that Wyandotte County was the wrong venue for charges to be brought against him.

Scott Toth, attorney for Hughes, said the interview in which his client allegedly lied occurred in his home in Leavenworth County.

Burns rejected both arguments.

Closing statements will be given Thursday morning, after which the case will go to the jury.

This week’s trial is the first against defendants accused of crimes in Caleb Schwab’s death.

A grand jury in April indicted Schlitterbahn co-owner Jeff Henry and Verruckt lead designer John Schooley with second-degree murder and a host of other felony charges for lacking the qualifications to design a ride like Verruckt and subsequently ignoring warnings about its safety.

Tyler Miles, a former director of operations for the Kansas City, Kan., water park, is charged with involuntary manslaughter and other counts related to accusations that he covered up the poor maintenance of the water slide.