Quarry-Jumping Season Opens With Fatality

June 4, 2008— -- For thrill-seekers, it's a 65-foot free-fall rite of passage.

For law enforcement, it's the root of an endless cat-and-mouse game that too often ends in a 911 call.

That was the case Saturday when the sheriff's office, fire department and dive team in Monroe County, Ind., pulled Walter Ayala's unconscious body from a 26-foot-deep spot at the bottom of Sanders Quarry.

Ayala had leapt from "Rooftop," a 65-foot plunge made famous in the 1979 Oscar-winner "Breaking Away." The classic coming-of-age film is described in its trailer as "the story of four guys in imminent danger of turning 20" and opens with a sequence at the quarry that immortalized the illegal jump.

Ayala, 18 and a recent high school graduate, was in Bloomington for a high school track meet when he and two friends trespassed on the private quarry site, according to Sgt. Troy Thomas, a spokesman for the Monroe County Sheriff's Office.

Video rolled as Ayala made his attempt, and friends described watching as his body tilted back during the free fall. "They could tell it just didn't look right," Thomas said. "They noticed his head smack back hard."

Two friends can be seen on the video jumping in to help Ayala as he goes under. A passing photographer saw the commotion and called 911. The dive team, which conducts training at the site, retrieved his body. CPR was unsuccessful on the ground and in the ambulance. Ayala was pronounced dead at the hospital, Thomas said, and a county coroner ruled his initial cause of death as a drowning.

Thomas did not know the exact number of deaths that occurred in jumps from the Rooftop, but said that Ayala's was not the first. Despite the warnings, he said that the danger level just doesn't sink in. "There are people who have died there and people who are still paralyzed, but they want to experience it for themselves," Thomas said. "It's kind of like Russian Roulette."

Additional toxicology tests will take several week but Thomas said that authorities do not believe Ayala and his friends were drinking or using drugs at the quarry, two factors Thomas said are often involved in quarry jumping accidents.

In 2006 and 2007, 27 people died as a result of drownings at U.S. quarry sites, according to federal statistics posted on the Mine Safety and Health Administration Web site. Countless more are injured.

Capt. Jerry Minger, a spokesman for the Indiana University Police Department, described the famous "Rooftop" jump as "an attractive nuisance" to local teens and university students new to campus who may have heard rumors about the jump or seen "Breaking Away."