A Colombian Woman Misunderstood Her Bungee Instructor’s ‘Jump’ Signal and Fell To Her Death

Courtesy Newsflash; yisparra/TikTok

Part of the rush of daredevil activities like skydiving and bungee jumping is the feeling that you are defying death. But along with these death-defying activities comes the very real possibility of hurting yourself. Sadly, Yecenia Morales, one young Colombian woman died when bungee jumping with her boyfriend. To make things more tragic, her death was due to a simple miscommunication.

25-year-old Yecenia Morales plummeted to her death after she thought a bungee jumping staff member signaled for her to jump. But they hadn’t attached Morales to a bungee chord yet.

“She got confused. The signal was for the boyfriend to jump because he was already attached to the security equipment,” said mayor of Fredonia, Gustavo Guzmán to El Tiempo. “They had only put the harness on her so she got confused and rushed.”

According to reports, this was Yecenia Morales’s first time bungee jumping. She and her boyfriend had made the trek to the Amaga viaduct in northern Colombia–a popular spot for bungee jumpers. When a member of the staff of the Sky Bungee Jumping company signaled Morales’s boyfriend to jump, Morales misunderstood the signal and jumped herself. The Daily Mail reports that local authorities are investigating the area after hearing claims that two companies are offering “unauthorized” bungee jumping services at the Amaga viaduct.

Yecenia Morales fell 164 ft from the top of the viaduct to the ground. Her boyfriend rushed to the ground and desperately tried to resuscitate her with CPR. But, it was already too late.

Later, firefighters arrived at the scene and pronounced her dead. Hospital doctors told local media outlets that Yecenia Morales suffered a heart attack before she hit the ground. Morales’s boyfriend also went to the hospital with injuries that he sustained when he rushed to the ground to help her. He is reportedly in a state of shock over the death of his girlfriend.

Morales’s family and loved are grieving over the sudden and shocking death of the young lawyer. The young woman’s brother released a statement calling his late sister “a girl with all the best values​​, happy, spontaneous, with virtues that made her love her friends, and helped the people in need.” He added that she she had an “entrepreneurial spirit” and that she loved to read and dance.

It is extremely rare for someone to die from a bungee jumping accident. Over the last 20 years, in the US 23 people have died from bungee-related injuries. That averages to 1.15 deaths per year.