A skydiving instructor was killed Saturday, Oct. 4, after a tandem jump accident left him separated from his student and without a parachute.
The Metropolitan Nashville Police Department (MNPD)
identified the instructor as 35-year-old Justin Robert Fuller of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. The department said Fuller and a 46-year-old student became stuck on the side of the plane in a tandem rig. Fuller became separated from the rig and fell from the sky.
The student’s emergency parachute deployed, and he became “lodged in a tree with an open parachute in the woods in the 4500 block of Ashland City Highway.”
Fire Department rescuers were able to use ladders and a pulley system to bring him down after he was suspended for several hours. He was “awake, alert & in stable condition,” Nashville Fire officials said in a statement on X.
A MNPD helicopter crew later found Fuller’s body in the clearing of a wooded area off Ashland City Highway, the department said. Three other skydivers who had jumped earlier landed safely, and the plane landed without incident at John C. Tune Airport.
The incident involved Go Skydive Nashville. The company’s
website describes tandem skydiving as meaning that an experienced professional skydives with you the whole way down. “You are securely attached to your instructor — hence, you jump in tandem. The expert controls your flight, parachute, and landing,” the website states, adding that “First-time jumpers always skydive with a freefall master – a Go Skydive Nashville instructor certified by the United States Parachute Association.”
Friends and colleagues remembered Fuller, known by the nickname “Spidey,” as an experienced instructor with more than 5,000 jumps.
Fox 17 News reported that sources close to the incident said Fuller’s harness became caught on the plane’s step and that he may have cut himself loose to save his student, a father of multiple children.
The Federal Aviation Administration will be leading the investigation, according to the MNPD.
According to the United States Parachute Association (USPA)'s 2024 Annual Survey, there were about 3.9 million skydives made in the United States in 2024. There were about 1.3 million abroad, according to the USPA. The United States recorded nine fatalities, a rate of roughly one death per 431,000 jumps. The association said that figure was "a fatality index of 0.23, the lowest on record."
About 12 percent of U.S. Parachute Association members said they used their reserve parachute at least once in 2024, with some reporting multiple deployments. The estimated number of reserve rides for 2024 was 7,652. A reserve parachute is a certified backup parachute designed for fast deployment in emergencies if the main chute fails. About 6 percent of USPA members reported experiencing an injury that required medical treatment in 2024.
