Goliath Investigation: What We Know So Far

Updated October 22, 2026. The investigation is still open. Nothing below is an official finding unless it says so.

On the afternoon of Monday, October 12, 2026, Hassan Jihad Ibn Kariem, 42, of Atlanta, died after he came out of his seat on Goliath, the 200-foot Bolliger & Mabillard hypercoaster at Six Flags Over Georgia. Four other riders, all minors, were hurt. Ten days later, Georgia’s investigators still have not said what went wrong. Six Flags hasn’t either. Most of the Six Flags hypercoasters that were closed as a precaution are still closed.

Kariem was a teacher at Wesley International Academy who had survived cancer twice. His family calls him a “gentle giant.” He was laid to rest the week after the incident. They have asked people not to share videos or photos of his final moments, and this article doesn’t link to any.

Here is what the reporting, the public records, and the most-watched ride-mechanic breakdowns tell us so far, and where they disagree.

The ride

Goliath opened on April 1, 2006. It’s a B&M Hyper Coaster: a 200-foot chain lift, a 175-foot drop, 70 mph top speed, and 4,480 feet of out-and-back track. There are no inversions, but there’s a lot of airtime. Each train has nine cars that seat four riders across, 36 in all, and every seat has its own lap bar, B&M’s “clamshell,” with nothing over the shoulders. The height minimum is 54 inches.

The ride had one earlier death. In July 2006, its first summer, a 45-year-old man lost consciousness on the ride and died of an apparent heart attack. The coaster was inspected, found to be operating properly, and reopened.

Timeline

Before the incident (Oct. 12): Several guests say Goliath wasn’t running smoothly that day. The New York Post reported an earlier interruption, with maintenance work and test runs. A mother, Erica Billups, told the AP that about an hour before the incident one restraint on her kids’ train kept unlocking. She said her son moved to another seat and the train left with that seat empty and its bar up. Investigators have not verified her account. Riders on the fatal train told PEOPLE they heard unusual clicking from a restraint and saw employees check it more than once before dispatch.
About 3:58 p.m.: Witnesses say a rider came out of his seat near the end of the circuit, on the run of bunny hills before the last turn into the brakes, in front of the on-ride camera. They say he struck the train and other riders on the way out. Cobb County police found him unresponsive beneath the ride.
Right after: The next train was stopped on the lift hill. That’s the train in the news-helicopter footage, and it had nothing to do with the incident. Nearly 20 riders were walked down the lift’s service stairs over about an hour. The park was evacuated and closed.
That night: Six Flags temporarily closed what it called “similar attractions” at its other parks (list below).
Oct. 13: Police named Kariem. They said preliminary interviews indicate he was ejected, struck other riders, and fell beneath the ride. Cobb County’s Major Crimes Unit and the Georgia Office of the Commissioner of Insurance and Safety Fire (OCI) opened investigations. B&M confirmed it was investigating too.
Oct. 14: Commissioner John King called it one of the most serious investigations his office has handled in a long time. He said Goliath won’t reopen until officials are satisfied it’s safe.
Oct. 15: OCI said Goliath’s last state inspection, on March 16, 2026, found “no violations, deficiencies, citations, or red tags.” Magic Mountain reopened its own Goliath, a different ride from a different manufacturer, after a two-day inspection.
Oct. 16: At a county press conference, police said they don’t have enough information to decide on criminal charges. The park reopened for Fright Fest that evening, with Goliath closed.
Oct. 20: SeaWorld Orlando reopened Mako, which it had closed on October 13 to check its restraints.

What the family says happened

The person sitting next to Kariem was his partner’s 13-year-old niece. She was at the park celebrating her birthday, and turning 13 meant she could finally ride the big coasters. Her father, Joshua Nelson, told WSB-TV what she saw: “She said he fainted or… passed out and then they went up and down, up and down, up and down, and she said it went up again and his latch, I guess, snapped or came loose and he fell.” Paramedics checked her at the scene and she wasn’t physically hurt.

That account matters, because it raises two separate questions: what happened to Kariem, and what happened to the restraint. Investigators haven’t confirmed either one.

The inspection records

WSB-TV got Goliath’s state inspection records through an open-records request. The March 16 inspection was officially clean. The inspector’s notes do say, though, that bushings needed to be replaced. Bushings are sleeves that cut friction and vibration in moving joints. The records don’t say where on the ride those bushings were, or whether they had anything to do with the restraints. The 2024 and 2025 inspections also listed no violations.

Georgia inspects each ride before it first opens and at least once a year after that, for a $65 permit fee. Under state rules, a ride involved in a death or serious injury stays shut until the state finishes its investigation, and OCI has the final say on whether Goliath runs again. Accident reports aren’t public records in Georgia. And because fixed-site park rides aren’t federally regulated, no national agency will step in.

What the ride mechanics on YouTube think

Since there’s been no official word, a lot of people have gone to people who have actually worked on these trains. Here are the most-watched explainers. View counts are as of October 22. All of them are speculation, and the creators say so.

Ryan the Ride Mechanic: “the restraint shouldn’t be able to do that”

Ryan worked on B&M floorless coasters, and his first video, “Goliath ride accident, speculation, and thoughts” (about 768,000 views), is the most-watched expert take on the incident. He walks through B&M engineering drawings and behind-the-scenes photos of a different B&M hyper’s restraint:

Each lap bar locks through toothed cams and four sets of spring-loaded pawls, two pawls per set, sitting a half-step apart. That’s why every click you hear is actually two pawls dropping in. The locking hardware is doubled side by side, so if one claw broke, the other would still hold.
A proximity sensor reads the bar’s position, and the train can’t be dispatched unless every seat reads locked.
From the circulating on-ride photo, the empty seat’s bar looked fully open. Ryan said that doesn’t fit a large rider slipping out from under a bar that was barely closed.
His first theory was a fatigue crack at the toe of a weld on the bar’s tube. In that case the locking box could still be locked while the bar itself bent open.

In “Goliath restraint learning and failure part 2” (about 161,000 views), he backs away from the cracked-tube idea, calling it possible but unlikely. His new theory is a stack of small maintenance problems:

One rod across the bottom of each row unlocks all four bars at once. It’s adjusted with a turnbuckle. If the turnbuckle backed out, or the rod’s return spring was sticking, the whole row’s pawls could sit only partly engaged: not open, but not fully seated either.
Add worn, rounded teeth and too much or too little grease, and the pawls can ride up over each other instead of catching. Once one tooth skips, the next one is likely to go too.
Guests reported restraints locking and unlocking on their own in the station. Ryan reads that as a sensor flag sitting right on the edge of its range.
One witness said staff needed a special bar to open that row afterward instead of using the normal release. That points him back at the unlock linkage.

He says the parts on the floorless coasters he worked on had tolerances of about a millimeter. On seatbelts, he says a belt “might have helped,” but B&M’s engineering doesn’t count one toward the restraint’s safety, since a rider can unbuckle it after the bar is checked. Belts can also chew up the clamshell foam. He also explained how to read reopenings: if the other B&M hypers come back quickly, the problem probably wasn’t in the train design.

Hennisphere: “the harness monitoring system let it go”

Hennisphere was a mechanic on two B&M coasters in Texas. The channel’s two videos, “Goliath Roller Coaster Accident Details” (about 320,000 views) and “Contributing Factors Emerge” (about 309,000), focus on the electronics instead of the steel:

Goliath does have a seat-by-seat restraint monitoring system. Photos show the brass contact rails under the train. On each seat, a proximity sensor is supposed to flag at the third click. If the sensor’s jam nuts work loose, a gap change of about 1/16 inch can make a seat read locked when it isn’t.
Operators have a visual backup: a yellow line on the restraint column that only shows once the bar is down far enough. Hennisphere says a rider video circulating on X shows one seat with no yellow line from the top of the lift to the end of the ride. Hennisphere calls it a “horrible look” for the park.
At Carowinds, Hennisphere tried the test seats for the same model and says they turned green before the second click.
The theory: a sensor out of adjustment, a missed visual check, and possibly a mechanical slip as well, all on the same seat.

Other widely shared takes

Reconstructed, “The Six Flags Coaster That Ejected a Rider” (about 1 million views), is a documentary-style reconstruction built from witness interviews. It compares this case with the 2013 Texas Giant death at Six Flags Over Texas. In that case the panel showed a lap bar locked that an employee thought was too high. The ride came back 57 days later with seatbelts and a test seat.
Former operator Brycen Whatley (TMZ, about 760,000 views) ran Goliath in 2024. He describes the three-click minimum, the yellow-line check, and 20 to 30 training cycles for operators. He says a “pin-slip” could in theory let a bar open under extreme force, but it would usually affect only one latch.
Karly (@officialkarlyc), a former Great Adventure employee, posted a TikTok with more than 3.1 million views. She suggests the bar may have been on its very last locking click, so the rider fit the computer’s check but not the seat, and was lifted out during airtime. She calls it a theory. The open-bar photo Ryan describes argues against it.
Ken Martin, a ride-safety consultant, on NewsNation, says the key questions are whether the restraint closed properly and whether it had a defect. He also notes that without federal oversight, the public may never get a full answer.

Where the theories disagree

Everyone agrees on one thing: a B&M lap bar has enough redundancy that a single broken part shouldn’t open it. Several things would have had to go wrong together. Here’s where the main theories split:

Mechanical wear and adjustment (Ryan, part 2): the unlock linkage, worn teeth, or lubrication let a locked bar work its way open during the ride. The station complaints that day and the special bar needed to open the row afterward fit this theory.
Sensor and operations (Hennisphere): the bar was never properly locked, the sensor said it was, and the visual check missed it.
Structural crack (Ryan, part 1): the bar’s tube cracked while the lock held. Ryan now calls this unlikely.
Rider fit (Karly, some commenters): the bar was barely locked against the rider’s body. A fully open bar in the photo is hard to square with this one.
A medical event: the niece’s account says he passed out first. That could explain why he didn’t brace himself or hold on. It doesn’t explain how a locked bar ended up open.

Investigators will most likely piece this together from the train’s control-system logs, the seat’s restraint hardware, the maintenance records (including those bushings), and the station and on-ride video. None of that has been made public.

Which coasters closed, and which have reopened

Six Flags closed Goliath plus nine coasters at six other parks. Eight are B&M hypers or gigas with the same four-across clamshell lap bars:

Fury 325 and Thunder Striker, Carowinds: closed
Orion and Diamondback, Kings Island: closed
Behemoth and Leviathan, Canada’s Wonderland: closed indefinitely (park update, Oct. 16)
Nitro, Six Flags Great Adventure: closed
Raging Bull, Six Flags Great America: closed
Goliath, Six Flags Magic Mountain (Giovanola, not B&M): reopened Oct. 15

Other operators closed their B&M hypers on their own. Mako at SeaWorld Orlando reopened on October 20. Hersheypark reopened Candymonium, the newest B&M hyper in the US, after saying B&M didn’t require any changes. Apollo’s Chariot at Busch Gardens Williamsburg was also closed for a restraint check. La Ronde’s Goliath in Montreal, a different B&M model, closed for a safety review.

Ryan’s rule of thumb is a useful one: if the Six Flags B&M hypers stay closed while other parks’ reopen, the fix is probably something specific to how those trains have been maintained or set up, not the design itself. Either way, watch for a B&M service bulletin.

What happens next

OCI has to finish its investigation before Goliath can reopen. It has given no timeline and hasn’t said how much of its findings will be made public.
Cobb County police will finish their part after the state does. Police say any charging decision would depend on the circumstances, including intent.
B&M is running its own investigation. If it finds a fleet-wide issue, it would likely send a service bulletin to every park with these trains.
No lawsuit over Kariem’s death had been reported as of this writing.

We’ll update this page when investigators release findings or the closed coasters start reopening.

Sources

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What We Know About the Goliath Investigation at Six Flags Over Georgia