The owner of an inflatable trampoline which exploded, killing a three-year-old girl, has been jailed for six months for health and safety offences.
Ava-May Littleboy was thrown into the air when the equipment failed on Gorleston beach in Norfolk, with a witness saying she went the “height of a house”, Chelmsford Magistrates’ Court heard.
Ava-May, from Somersham in Suffolk, had been taken by family and friends to the Bounce About attraction that had been set up on the beach at Gorleston-on-Sea in Norfolk, on July 1, 2018.
She and a nine-year-old girl were on the trampoline when the blast happened without warning.
While the older child suffered minor injuries, Ava-May was thrown upwards – witnesses described her as being shot up between 20 and 40 feet, or the height of a house.
She landed on the beach and in the process, she sustained fatal head injuries.
District judge Christopher Williams, sentencing on Friday, said inflatable owner Curt Johnson was “wilfully blind to the risk” and that the inflatable “should not have been in use”.
The judge also disqualified Johnson from being a company director for five years and fined Johnsons Funfair Ltd £20,000.
More follows on this breaking story….