I am well familiar with the problems of finding a west wind kite launch in Broward County where this incident happened. I used to struggle to find west wind windsurfing launches over 25 years ago. They usually sucked for a windsurfer and for a kite, I wouldn't even bother. Windsurfers can glide through extended lulls, kites just stall, fly up, teabag and drop the kiter and get up to other things making it a pain in the butt, or worse. I found the location and rough time of this incident to better understand what went wrong, see above. Wind which has passed over land here is excessively gusty, with pronounced high and low winds making kiteboarding impractical and unsafe. From the age of his kite and lack of reaction, unhook the damn thing, even when motion stopped, I wonder about his training and experience. He may not have known just how bad an idea launching there was. We had another guy hit a sign a bit north, again launching in an area with excess wind shadow. People need to know enough to pick where to kite and why.
Well ALL need to understand why launching here is a bad idea and share the knowledge. We had another guy launch in a heavily wind shadowed place north of here within the month, got lofted into a sign and seriously hurt. It goes without saying, I hope, that ALL instructors know about this stuff and share it with their students.
More about wind shadow aka mechanical turbulence and why we need to avoid it at the following link. Some kiters were lost at some of the places shown.