Alicia Brewer was at home on a work conference call Friday afternoon when her cellphone rang. It was her son, Grant, who was at the Oaks Amusement Park with his sister, Isabella, and about eight of her friends.
Brewer picked up the phone, knowing something had to be wrong for her 12-year-old son to call while at the amusement park.
“Is everything OK?” she asked.
“Everything is definitely not OK,” Grant said. “Bella’s upside down.”
He explained that his sister was on a ride that got stuck, leaving the riders hanging in the air, their feet pointing to the sky.
Alicia Brewer ran to her car and headed towards Oaks Amusement Park from her Northeast Portland home. Still on the phone with her son, she told him he had a critical task: He had to tell paramedics about Isabella’s medical condition.
Ultimately, nobody was severely injured during the approximately 25 minutes that 28 people — most of them children — were hanging upside down on the AtmosFEAR ride at the Southeast Portland amusement park. But it was, nonetheless, a harrowing experience, including for Isabella, who suffered a minor seizure on the ride and was taken to a hospital after the riders finally were brought back down to earth.
One family has already filed suit against Oaks Amusement Park in Multnomah County Circuit Court, seeking up to $125,000 for negligence, according to the plaintiff’s attorney, Michael Fuller. The suit claims that 14-year-old Evie Yannotta was stuck on the ride and since then has suffered physical pain and discomfort, mental suffering, terror, fright, emotional distress and other difficulties. The company had a duty to ensure the ride would be safe and failed to do so, according to the lawsuit, which was first reported by Willamette Week.
In particular, the lawsuit claims Oaks Amusement Park failed to maintain and operate the ride in a safe condition, failed to have the necessary tools at hand to fix it quickly, and didn’t know the proper procedure to repair the ride without having to call the manufacturer.
In the days since the incident, questions have swirled about the precise timeline of events and whether park employees and Portland Fire & Rescue rescuers acted fast enough to rescue the children.
Oaks Amusement Park has said the ride got stuck at 2:55 p.m. and that first responders arrived at the ride “at approximately 3:20 p.m.” — 25 minutes later. Portland Fire & Rescue, meanwhile, insisted that they arrived at the scene mere minutes after getting the call.
Both have since clarified what happened and when. Portland Fire & Rescue rescuers actually got to the AtmosFEAR ride at 3:14 p.m., 13 minutes after they said 911 received the call for help.
Three riders said they were struck by what they perceived to be the slow pace of rescuers’ work.
Daniel Allen, 17, said he saw a fire engine arrive at the park and stop, the driver step out, get back in the truck and then re-park before Portland Fire & Rescue workers started to walk — slowly, Allen felt — towards the ride.
“They were not in any rush,” Allen said. “You’re kind of wanting people to rush, get you safe. And they were just taking it very calmly.”
Portland Fire & Rescue spokesperson Rick Graves said the department actively trains people not to run in such situations but instead to stay calm in the face of stress.
“Fast running often leads to missing information on the scene and this missing information leads to accidents and injuries,” Graves said.
Soon after fire department rescuers got to the ride, Allen heard metallic cranking and, minutes after the crews started the work, the ride started coming down.
The Oaks Amusement Park’s ride engineer manually forced the ride to start coming back down using a tool borrowed from the fire department, park spokesperson Emily MacKay said. By 3:20 p.m. the ride was reported “unstuck,” Graves said in an emailed response to questions.
Once the ride returned to the ground, ambulance and fire department crews checked riders’ vital signs, which took several minutes each. All the riders were reunited with friends or family by 3:53 p.m., Graves said.
For Isabella’s family, the road to a full emotional, mental and physical recovery might take weeks, if not longer.
One year earlier, Alicia Brewer was stepping out of the house when she heard a crashing sound from inside. She went back in and found her daughter convulsing on the floor, her eyes rolled back, blood coming out of her mouth and her face turning blue.
Doctors soon diagnosed her with juvenile epilepsy.
Isabella Brewer’s active and vibrant life came to a virtual standstill for the six or so months that followed as doctors kept working on finding the right dosage to treat her. She stopped playing soccer and spending time with friends, primarily because she was afraid that she could have a seizure at any moment.
Life began to get back to normal in recent months, despite the challenges, Brewer said. It helped that the medications are, by all accounts, working — she hadn’t had a seizure since last August.
Things were going so well, in fact, that on Friday the All Saints School student was on a trip to Oaks Amusement Park with a group of friends.
Soon after the ride stopped, leaving the riders upside down, Isabella began to panic, believing she was going to die, because of her epilepsy, she told The Oregonian/OregonLive. At one point, she felt like she was losing control of her arms, a telltale sign of a seizure. Then, she decided that if she was going to die, she wanted her last moments to be good.
“I just started to think, if I am going to die up here, I want to be at least at peace. I just want to admire what’s around me instead of screaming, crying,” she said. “I just want to have at least one last good memory.”
Grant Brewer managed to get through to the paramedics and tell them Isabella had epilepsy. They took her off the ride first and over to a waiting ambulance right as their mother arrived. The girl stayed at Randall Children’s Hospital at Legacy Emanuel about an hour-and-a-half and was diagnosed with suffering a minor seizure, Brewer said.
Isabella Brewer is now recovering at home, and won’t be going out for any active activities for several weeks, her mother said.
Alicia Brewer said she is proud of both her children: Her son was calm and acted decisively when it seemed his sister’s life could be hanging in the balance. Her daughter, meanwhile, faced the fear of death with poise and an equally calm attitude.
“I’m just so proud of her — of who she is and how strong she is and how resilient she is,” she said.
Neither the park nor the fire department reported any serious injuries after all the riders got off.
While the park reopened Saturday, the AtmosFEAR ride will remain closed until it goes through several inspections, MacKay said.
The ride was manufactured by the amusement park rides company Zamperla. The ride first opened at the Oaks Amusement Park in 2021 and has passed every annual inspection — performed by the ride’s insurance company, not the state — since then, including the most recent one, in March.
Because nobody was injured or killed in Friday’s incident and because there was no property damage, Oaks Amusement Park has not been required to report what happened to the Oregon Department of Consumer and Business Services, which permits amusement rides in the state.
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