The Garfield County prosecutor has decided he can’t prove who’s responsible for the death of a 6-year-old Colorado Springs girl who plummeted more than 100 feet to her death over Labor Day at a Glenwood Springs amusement park and will not file criminal charges.

In a two-page letter issued Jan. 25, Ninth Judicial District District Attorney Jefferson Cheney said he doesn’t have sufficient evidence to prove which of two employees at the Glenwood Caverns Adventure Park was responsible for not affixing the safety belt of Wongel Estifanos before she fell from the park’s Haunted Mine Drop ride.

Cheney said that he could not prove “beyond a reasonable doubt any one person or entity acted with criminal negligence or was criminally reckless beyond a reasonable doubt,” according to a copy of Cheney’s letter obtained late Tuesday by The Denver Gazette.

He declined to charge either of the two workers – identified as Toby Williams and Steve Ochoa in a civil complaint filed by Estifanos’s family – with criminally negligent homicide or manslaughter.

Neither of the men could be reached late Tuesday by The Gazette. An email to park officials was not immediately returned.

Estifanos’s family said it would have a statement about Cheney’s decision on Wednesday. Their attorney, Dan Caplis, could not be reached late Tuesday.

The Colorado agency that licenses amusement parks in October fined the business $68,000 after investigators determined the employees failed to notice the girl was sitting on the two safety belts when they overrode a security system warning of a problem and sent the ride on its fatal plunge. The park was ordered to close and workers were required to undergo additional safety training.

The fines included a pair of $1,000 assessments against the park’s ownership, Glenwood Caverns Holdings LLC, for each employee’s failure to ensure Estifanos was buckled in. The other $66,000 — a $1,000 fine for each day of a 66-day period — is for the park’s failure to properly train all operators of the Haunted Mine Drop, including its safety and warning systems.

The ride was intentionally designed without safety harnesses — a mainstay feature on other vertical drop rides — to make it more exciting. It relies on two lap belts: One that is like a safety belt in a motor vehicle and the other with a special bolt on its end that fits into a monitored locking mechanism.

The girl’s parents, Estifanos Dagne and Rahel Estifanos, filed their lawsuit in Denver District Court, claiming the adventure park employees were reckless in not seeing that Wongel was sitting on her lap belts. The girl had taken the tail of the belt and held it over her lap. It had remained fastened from the previous ride because the seat was unoccupied, according to the state’s investigation report.

Rather than physically check each belt, one of the operators reset the ride — turning off a warning system that noted there was a problem — and sent the platform on which Wongel and five of her relatives sat on its way down the 110-foot shaft.

It wasn’t until the platform reached the bottom that Wongel’s uncle went to ask if she enjoyed the ride and saw she was gone. Seeing her crumpled body on the ground before them, the family struggled to reach her but the platform automatically whisked them up the shaft, according to the lawsuit.

The park has had at least two complaints – neither of which were shared with state regulators at the time – about employees failing to notice riders of the Haunted Mine Drop were not buckled in. One of those complaints, from 2019, was turned over to investigators but the other, from 2018, was not, officials said.

Investigators say they learned of the earlier incident, in which a woman pleaded with ride operators not to send the platform into its plunge because a teenager was unbelted, after an attorney for the family shared the information from someone who had come forward.

State regulators said they were told the park did not have a method of recording or keeping complaints from customers. The park also told them that the 2019 emailed complaint went unnoticed because of a system problem, according to the state’s investigation report.