Florissant Woman Recalls Experience With Skydive Colorado

After a man was killed while skydiving tandem with an instructor in Fremont County, there are questions about the company that operated the jumps.

Jeremy Worrell, 35, of Crested Butte, died Sunday after the main and reserve parachutes opened at the same time and got tangled. Worrell was skydiving tandem Gregory Whitehurts, 28, of Fountain, who works for Skydive Colorado.

On Monday, KRDO learned that a Florissant woman also had a frightening experience with Skydive Colorado, and lived to tell about it.

In May 2011, Toni Hurley, her husband and their daughter chose to have their first skydiving experience with Skydive Colorado in Fremont County.

Hurley said her husband and daughter had wonderful experiences. However, she said that wasn?t the case for her jump. She said she nearly died and feels lucky to be alive.

Hurley showed KRDO videos her family purchased from Skydive Colorado.

At the beginning of the DVD, the family was all smiles as they prepared to jump out of the airplane. ?They had convinced me to do something daring,? said Hurley. ?I went along willingly.?

?We jumped,? said Hurley, recalling her experience with the instructor. ?And then within about five minutes the instructor started cursing. I thought he was joking.?

She quickly learned that he was not joking.

?He said, ?Grab this,? and I don’t even know what it’s called,? said Hurley. ?It’s the thing that you pull to turn left or right. So he had me grab it with both hands and pull down as hard as I could.?

She said she knew the situation was dire, so she used all of her strength.

Then she realized what the problem was.

?He had the buckles on his jumper suit and the strings to the chute got caught in it and so our chute was in a big ball above us,” she said.

She said the parachute would not open.

?Meanwhile, we’re falling and falling and falling,? said Hurley.

They were rapidly plummeting towards the ground.

Despite that, she said she did not panic.

?I?m a Christian,? said Hurley. ?I know where I?m going if I die. If I panicked I know we would have been in trouble.?

?He finally pulled the reserve chute,? said Hurley. ?But we were pretty low to the ground.?

At that point, Hurley said they were very close to the ground. She pointed out that her video is extremely short because she didn?t have a long glide period. Her daughter?s video, on the other hand, revealed a long glide period since her jump didn?t have any complications.

?We landed hard,? said Hurley. ?He was quiet for a long time. He said to me, ?If you had panicked, we both would have died.’ And he told me that this was such a rare occurrence. (He said) it never happens. If it’s so rare, then why did it happen to me? Why did it happen to this gentleman??

Looking back, Hurley recalled that before she jumped, she said she asked the instructor about the cost of parachutes. ?The gentleman said they were either $6,000 to $8,000 or more, depending on the brand.?

Hurley said she asked him how much he had paid for his chute.

?He said that he got it used for about 2500 dollars,” she said.

She said that concerned her a bit at the time, but she had already paid and was up in the plane.

Then she heard about the death on Sunday.

?I felt like I had a moral obligation to say something so that something can be done to make sure this never happens again. I think purchasing a used parachute is not a good idea,? said Hurley. ?What if something goes wrong, like it did??

The cause of Sunday’s accident is under investigation.

Hurley said that after the hard landing she limped for two months, but now she is fine.

KRDO made several attempts to contact Neil Porter, the owner of Skydive Colorado, to ask him about Hurley?s experience, as well as Sunday?s accident. Porter did not return the phone calls.