The family of a 6-year-old Colorado Springs girl killed Labor Day weekend at a Glenwood Springs amusement park lashed out Wednesday at a prosecutor’s decision not to charge workers of the ride she died on with a crime, calling it “cheap and meaningless.”

“Once again our daughter’s life has been treated as cheap and meaningless. First by the amusement park and now by the DA,” the parents of Wongel Estifanos said in a statement issued by their attorney, Dan Caplis. “We never wanted the people who killed our daughter to go to jail. But for the DA to let them off with nothing says our daughter’s life was worth nothing.”

The parents, Estifanos Dagne and his wife, Rahel Estifanos, added: “What a terrible message to send. That in Glenwood Springs someone can recklessly kill a child and not even get a ticket.”

Ninth Judicial District Attorney Jefferson Cheney issued a decision letter Jan. 25 that determined he didn’t have sufficient evidence to prove which of two employees at the Glenwood Caverns Adventure Park was responsible for not affixing Estifanos’s safety belt before she fell more than 100 feet from the park’s Haunted Mine Drop ride.

Cheney said 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.

Colorado Springs girl who died at Glenwood Springs amusement park identified

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

Cheney said he understood the family’s reaction.

“I don’t have anything to offer except that I am saddened for their loss and empathize with their grief,” he told The Denver Gazette in an email Wednesday.

Neither of the workers could be reached by The Denver Gazette.

Park founder Steve Beckley said in a statement that he is “so sorry for their loss and while I understand that my words cannot touch their grief, my heart continues to ache for them.”

He added: “As I have said before, safety is and always has been our top priority. … One accident is one too many, and we are taking steps to be sure that nothing like that can ever happen again.”

Estifanos’s parents challenged Cheney’s decision, noting the workers weren’t given drug tests following the incident.

“We want the full truth,” the statement reads. “We want justice for our daughter. … The criminal system failed our daughter. We will now go to civil court and prove it on our own.”

The family filed a wrongful death claim in Denver District Court in October 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. The case is pending.

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.

Colorado Springs girl killed on mine drop ride was not strapped in, report says

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.

Colorado fines Glenwood Caverns park in girl’s death