One person died and a second was critically injured while skydiving in Perris on Thursday, May 28, Riverside County authorities said.
Firefighters were called to the 600 block of East Ellis Avenue just before 2 p.m., the Cal Fire/Riverside County Fire Department said.
Riverside County sheriff’s deputies found one skydiver dead in a field on the east side of the 215 Freeway and Fourth Street, said Lt. Deirdre Vickers, a department spokeswoman.
A second skydiver was discovered in the same area on the west side of the freeway and was hospitalized in critical condition. A third skydiver also was found, uninjured, Vickers said.
The coroner’s office later identified the deceased skydiver as Pascal Pierre Petetin, 57, a man from Punaauia, Tahiti.
Dan Brodsky-Chenfeld, the manager at Skydive Perris, said a group of three friends, all “very experienced skydivers from overseas,” jumped together from a plane that took off from Skydive Perris.
Their parachutes worked properly, he said, but there appears to have been a collision between two jumpers before or as their chutes deployed.
The injured skydiver landed with the main chute deployed. The jumper who perished landed with the reserve chute deployed, Brodsky-Chenfeld said.
“It is a very difficult time for the skydiving family,” said Brodsky-Chenfeld, a Federal Aviation Administration-certified parachute rigger and veteran of 32,000 jumps. “Ours is a very tight community.”
The most-recent skydiving fatality in Perris is believed to have happened on Oct. 11, 2025, when 76-year-old Richard Gonzales of Las Vegas perished in what the Sheriff’s Department described as a “landing accident.”
There were 16 civilian skydiving deaths nationwide in 2025, according to the U.S. Parachute Association — an average of 0.46 deaths per 100,000 jumps. There was an average of 12 deaths annually from 2018 to 2024, with a high of 20 in 2022 and a low of nine in 2024.
