A 45-year-old teacher was killed at Cedar Point yesterday after being hit by a roller coaster while looking for a cell phone he had dropped on the same ride earlier that day. Authorities were not sure if James A. Young was struck by the Raptor — once the world’s longest and tallest inverted roller coaster — or by a person riding it. He jumped a fence to look for the phone.
The ride stopped when he was hit, and riders were suspended in midair for ten minutes, unaware of what had happened. The Sandusky Police Department and the amusement park police are investigating the incident; they could not name another time someone had died at the park. At a press conference, an assistant police chief told reporters, “There’s really not a whole lot of questions you can ask me, because there’s really not a whole lot to say.”
