The six-year-old girl from Colorado Springs who fell 110 feet to her death while riding a Haunted Mine Drop ride at a Colorado theme park has been named publicly by her family.
Wongel Estifanos was with her extended family at Glenwood Caverns amusement park in Glenwood Springs when she slipped out of the ride and fell down the shaft of the free-fall attraction.
She was pictured by organizers of a GoFundMe page, who are aiming to raise $50,000 to cover 'the funeral cost and other expenses of the family at this difficult time.'
'Wongel was a beautiful, caring, and cheerful girl who loves Jesus so much for a six-year-old,' organizers divulged in the fundraiser. 'Her life was cut short in this tragic accident.'
'We want all the community to stand with the family during unthinkable loss,' the post went on to say. 'We understand nothing will bring her back, but we do not want this to be an additional burden to the parents.'
Wongel was a student at Stetson Elementary School in Colorado Springs, reported KRDO.
Wongel Estifanos was with her extended family at Glenwood Caverns Amusement, when she slipped out of the ride and fell down the shaft of the free-fall attraction
The Haunted Mine Drop that Wongel somehow fell out of first opened in 2017, and was specifically designed without shoulder restraints to make the dramatic drop 'a little bit more scary,' its designer, Stan Checketts, declared to KDVR when the attraction first opened.
However, days after the Sunday incident, details surrounding the specifics of the accident are still sparse.
Questions were being asked as to how a young child was allowed to board the ride, which was created to provide a wild experience. The investigation, conducted by the Glenwood County Sheriff's Office, will take weeks, with a report not be ready for months, officials told CBS.
The park was closed on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday - and will not reopen until Saturday.
Previous visitors to the attraction claimed that safety belts on the ride were not attached tight enough, leaving them fearful for their safety.
'I rode that ride in June and the young girl running the ride didn't seem to know what she was doing,' rider Sarah Akard wrote on Facebook.
'My safety belt wasn't tight and I felt like I was coming out of the ride.
'I tried to tell her but they started the ride. I'm thankful I was able to hold myself in. Prayers to the family and those on the ride.'
Checketts, the ride's designer, initially told KDVR that they made the decision to omit shoulder restraints in its design to make it 'a little bit more exciting'.
A post about the Haunted Mine Drop ride on the park's website, as well as a promotional video, were deleted on Monday morning
The vertigo-inducing ride was specifically designed to not include shoulder restraints
Stan Checketts, who designed the ride in 2017, said they deliberately did not include shoulder restraints to make the Haunted Mine Drop 'more scary'
He added, 'Usually as a rule, every ride that I've ever designed with my team and built with my team, I'm the first one to ride it.'
'In this particular case, that's not true. It's very unusual for me to be here and not even [have] ridden it yet and everybody's getting to ride it ahead of me.'
Checketts created and later sold S&S Sansei, one of the biggest amusement ride design manufacturers in the world.
The company has about 150 tower drop rides internationally, most recently in China.
Josh Hays, the company's director of sales and marketing, said they all have shoulder restraints.
He told The Denver Post that the Haunted Mine Drop, which Checketts designed after he'd sold and left S&S and had built by his company, Soaring Eagle Zipline in Utah, uses a different design.
He explained that the Haunted Mine Drop is a free-fall ride, while his company's tower drops are all propelled by pneumatics.
'All of our towers have shoulder restraints,' Hays said.
'When it comes to safety we don't want to reinvent the wheel when we have a design that works really well.'
Hays said modern rides cannot operate if any of their safety features are not properly affixed.
'All our rides are electronically monitored to know if a restraint is improperly fastened,' he said.
'There are redundancies. A ride cannot be dispatched without all the restraints checked and verified, manually and electronically.'
A guest of the park who rode the Haunted Mine Drop just hours before the incident occurred told CBS her seatbelt was
