Victim’s wife: Don’t let my husband’s skydiving death deter you from sport

By Rick Rouan

The victim had made his wife quit the sport because she was injury-prone.

BOARDMAN — The accident that killed two people should not scare potential skydivers away from the sport, said the wife of the veteran jumper who perished with his student Saturday.

That his death would push people away from the sport would upset Daniel R. Mathie, 30, of Boardman, a skydiving instructor who had jumped more than 4,000 times, said Jennifer Mathie, his wife.

“Skydiving is something that everyone should experience,” she said.

Dan Mathie and Sierra A. Thomas, 22, of Brunswick, died in a tandem jump Saturday at the Cleveland Parachute Center Inc. in Parkman. Mathie was an instructor at the club; Thomas was making her first jump.

“Dan was everything you could be in skydiving,” Jennifer Mathie said.

Jennifer met her husband on Sept. 1, 2001, when she was making her first of 86 jumps. The couple had been married for four years. Her husband was an experienced skydiver who had earned a reputation as a daredevil — and his nickname, “Danger”— since he began jumping at age 17, she said.

Jennifer said Dan had settled into his role as an instructor and videographer for new jumpers since the birth of his sons, Hunter, 6, and Trevor, 3. In fact, friends had re-dubbed him “Domesticated Dan.”

Jennifer said that some of her husband’s friends have offered to set up trust funds for her sons. Fellow skydivers will scatter his ashes in the air, a tradition among skydivers, next year. A more immediate memorial service has not been finalized, she said.

Jennifer described her husband as a skilled instructor who had experienced every imaginable scenario in the sky.

“Dan could get out of any malfunction,” she said. “If he could have done it, it would have been done.”

Dan Mathie and Thomas jumped from about 8,000 feet with a shared parachute. But when Mathie deployed the parachute, it did not fully open and began to spiral, said Portage County Sheriff David Doak.

Portage County Coroner Dr. Roger C. Marcial said an autopsy showed Mathie died of blunt force injuries to his head and a fractured neck.

Thomas , he said, died of a dislocated cervical (neck) spine.

Doak said that the Sheriff’s office is still investigating the accident, but that no cause has been determined. He said that the victims had an emergency parachute that was in working order but was not deployed.

The office also has a video that Dan Mathie was shooting during the dive, but Doak said it was “not as helpful as we thought it would be.”

Jennifer Mathie said that, despite her family’s tragedy, people should try the sport. She said her husband made her quit skydiving because she was injury-prone and he was afraid she would scare people into avoiding the sport.

“He told me to quit because I gave skydiving a bad name,” she joked.

According to the United States Parachute Association, 30 people died in skydiving accidents in 2008.

SEE ALSO: Skydiver was ‘thrill-seeker’.