What experts say the Six Flags death investigation will focus on

Ride inspection experts expect the investigation into the death of a man who fell from a Georgia roller coaster this month to examine if maintenance issues, design flaws or human error led to the incident at Six Flags Over Georgia.

The Goliath has been closed since 42-year-old Hassan Kariem died after witnesses say he was ejected from the ride.

John F. King, Georgia's Insurance and Safety Fire Commissioner, who is leading the investigation, said investigators will not "cut corners, rush to conclusions, or leave questions unanswered without making every effort to resolve them."

"Our team has been on the ground working day and night to ensure that every relevant detail receives the attention it deserves," he said in a statement last week. 

A spokesperson for the park said in a statement to CBS News that "our thoughts remain with the family and loved ones affected by the tragic incident in Georgia." 

"Nothing is more important to Six Flags than the safety of our guests and team members, and we remain focused on supporting ongoing investigations alongside state authorities and the ride manufacturer," the spokesperson said.

A March inspection of the Goliath roller coaster found no violations or deficiencies, King said. The inspection report did include a note indicating that staff "need to replace bushings" — a piece of the puzzle inspectors are sure to home in on, experts said.

Bushings are parts designed to reduce friction and absorb shock in various mechanical assemblies.

Maintenance issues or a design flaw?

Six Flags has opened five Goliath roller coasters at parks across North America in the last 25 years. The coaster, which opened in 2006 in Georgia, can reach speeds of up to 70 miles per hour on towering tracks that rise 200 feet. It was designed by Bolliger & Mabillard, a Swiss-based roller coaster manufacturer.

For Kariem to have been ejected from the ride, ride operators and roller coaster engineers suggested either a mechanical malfunction, operator error — for instance, failing to properly check and secure the restraint — or a combination of both, could have played a part. Rides and their restraints are supposed to be inspected by park maintenance each morning, they said. 

The park spokesperson said, "Safety is our ethos and is at the heart of everything we do at Six Flags." 

"Every ride undergoes documented safety inspections before opening each day, supported by comprehensive maintenance programs designed to meet or exceed industry safety guidelines," the spokesperson said. "Our ride operators complete a comprehensive, multi-stage training program that includes classroom instruction, hands-on training and supervised, on-the-job experience with additional instruction and evaluation provided whenever necessary."

When riders board the Goliath, they are buckled into the ride's 36 seats using a padded clamshell lap bar, a U-shaped restraint that is typically locked in place over a rider's thighs and waist. Ride operators check restraints to make sure they're locked before the ride begins.

Daniel, a self-described "big roller coaster nerd" who also operates a Goliath at another park, said the coaster is designed so staff can use a control panel with various buttons and a screen to operate the ride.

Daniel, who asked to use his middle name because he is still employed, said it was likely that ride operators used two orange buttons on the control panel to open and close the car restraints. When the sensors detect that every single restraint is closed, two green mushroom-shaped buttons at the bottom start blinking. That means that operators can press on them to dispatch the ride, he said.

Goliath inspection records obtained by CBS News, dating back over a decade, show a smattering of 20 quickly resolved violations between 2016 and 2021, and none since. 

However, Troy Richardson, an engineer with experience building and inspecting roller coasters, said the March inspection's note about bushings could be significant.

Bushings are used to keep mechanical pieces in restraints, chassis joints and wheel bogies, positioned correctly amid the repeated friction and bumps of a roller coaster ride. 

Even a small defect in a bushing can be a major problem, said Richardson, the founder and CEO of MIT Experts, which provides forensic consulting in amusement park litigation.

"A bushing, if it's slightly off a little bit, now the pin won't go into the hole or it's a little bit loose in the hole," he said.

Richardson added that the manufacturer of the roller coaster most likely laid out a maintenance and replacement schedule for each part in an operation manual. A key question investigators will ask, Richardson said, will be if staff adhered to those instructions.

A person with knowledge of the park's operations said the bushings identified in the March inspection were located on the ride's bogie assemblies, which connect the vehicle to the track, and unrelated to the restraint system. They were changed as recommended, the person said.

Another expert, Kathryn Woodcock, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Themed Experience and Attractions Studies, said investigators will want to know "what exactly is not the way it is expected to be."

"If two parts disconnected (e.g., a latch came undone), it is a different thing than if one part broke (e.g., a crack failed catastrophically)," Woodcock said.

Woodcock described the tricky process behind determining when to replace parts.

"It is not automatically better to replace a part too early," Woodcock, a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, wrote in an email. 

She said the likelihood of failure in roller coaster parts often falls along a "'bathtub curve,' where failure is most common at the start of use due to possible manufacturing defects, and then if it does not fail then, the failure likelihood is very low for a length of time — which depends on its material and shape and loading — when failure likelihood increases again." 

"In charge of some very important systems"

Six Flags operates nearly three dozen parks across North America, with more than 47 million guests and 95,000 employees in 2025, according to SEC filings. 

At Six Flags Magic Mountain in California, the death of 22-year-old Christopher Hawley after he rode the X2 roller coaster in 2022 prompted questions about ride maintenance and inspection, said Timothy Loranger, an attorney who represented Hawley's family. 

"What I did see in having talked to people who maintained the rides, I did not come away from those conversations feeling confident that they were competent in their jobs, I felt like they didn't have appropriate training," Loranger said. "They were in charge of some very important systems and maybe didn't really even understand what they were doing."

Six Flags Magic Mountain settled the wrongful death lawsuit with Hawley's family. The park shuttered X2 permanently in September, after lawsuits alleging riders suffered brain injuries piled up. (The Doan Law Firm, which tracks published claims of theme park-related fatalities, lists two previous deaths on Goliaths in its database: a 2002 brain aneurysm at Six Flags Magic Mountain in California and a 2006 death listed as a likely heart attack on Six Flags Over Georgia's Goliath.)  

Loranger said he wouldn't be surprised if the same challenges he saw at Magic Mountain arose at Six Flags Over Georgia.

Ride operators at Six Flags Over Georgia spoke to CBS News about the training and management they received while being tasked with ensuring the safety of thrill-seekers.

Jacobi Edwards, 18, who was a ride operations lead at Six Flags Over Georgia for several months last spring, described it as "a very well-run place," saying he's proud of his work there. But he chose to work on other roller coasters, in part because of Goliath's popularity.

"They have a clock to beat as that is the most famous ride in the park, so they do definitely feel rushed," said Edwards, who was 17 when he worked at the park. 

He said when he was on the clock, he prioritized guest safety over trying to get "more cycles in."

Richardson, the MIT engineer, said park supervisors need to trust park staff as "ambassadors … that are trying to keep people safe and be your frontline."

"I don't care if there's 100 people in the line, we don't want somebody to die, you know? And they need to have that ability to come in and say, 'Hey, I have the authority to shut this down if I don't think it's safe,'" Richardson said.

Richard Pretlow, park president of Six Flags Over Georgia, said in a statement after the incident, "our team members receive extensive training to safely operate and maintain our rides." 

But Harper Henderson,18, a former employee who started her job at Six Flags Over Georgia when she was 15, said the pressure to keep lines for the Goliath moving was paralleled by the rush to get new employees trained to operate the coaster.

Like Edwards, Henderson said she was promoted to trainer at 17 years old — after six weeks as a ride operator.

"Whenever we got a new employee, I would walk them through the operating procedures for all the rides and then watch them as they pretend they're operating the ride, or pretend to help with the restraints or something," she said. "And I would do that over and over again until I thought they were ready for the test and then I would send them to take the test."

She described it as a process that "could be done in about an hour." Henderson said ride operators needed at least an hour to review all the training.

CBS News reviewed operator tests for two Six Flags Over Georgia rides: Georgia Scorcher and the Log Jamboree. The questions, on a Microsoft Forms sheet, asked about the mechanics of each ride and its safety procedures. For example, in the Georgia Scorcher quiz, operators are asked, "What does it mean when the DISPATCH buttons flash on the main operator?"

Henderson said the rides were often so busy she had to rush the training. 

"We would just give them the test answers," Henderson said, adding that new operators would then be ready to work in "15 minutes."

Henderson said she wasn't comfortable with the process. She said she resigned in July 2025.

"The fact that you could just skip, that was not great," she said. "And it was because the managers really pushed to have the minimum amount of people to open every ride."