By MICHAEL PARRISH
After their son asked for a day at a Northern California paintball park for his 10th birthday, Mark and Colette Contois did their homework, questioning friends and searching the Internet before deciding that with the proper equipment, the sport was safe.
The Contoises did not come across any information about a hazard they would encounter that afternoon in 2004. A 14-year-old player inadvertently detached a valve, launching his gun’s carbon-dioxide-filled cylinder as an unguided missile. It struck Ms. Contois, who was watching from a picnic area off the field, in the back of the head. She never regained consciousness, and died at the scene.
Her husband soon discovered that only months before, a similar accident had killed a 15-year-old boy in Washington State. Then he learned that manufacturers had known of the potential danger from the valve-and-cylinder combination since 1990. Mr. Contois (pronounced con-TOYZ) undertook a campaign to improve safety awareness about a sport he has never played, and for which no national statistics on deaths or injuries are maintained.
One of the fastest-growing sports worldwide, paintball is far safer now than in its early days, the late 1970s. But it remains a combat-style game often played unsupervised in backyards or rural spaces, sometimes by children younger than 10. And despite industry efforts to improve equipment, older, far more dangerous guns and parts remain in use, a problem that Mr. Contois says the companies have done too little to warn about.
“It’s a travesty that the industry has known about this problem,” he said.
Mr. Contois, 44, won $8 million from manufacturers and distributors of the valve and cylinder that killed his wife. But the most important part of his settlement with them, he says, was an agreement by the chief defendant, National Paintball Supply, to publicize warnings about the danger of older valves.
