A champion female Australian skydiver died after she attempted a new method of jumping in Texas.

Melissa Porter, 29, had just won the gold medal along with her skydiving partner Josh Tassicker at the Australian Skydiving Championships this spring. But on June 24, she tried a risky maneuver called “swooping” at the Skydive Spaceland Houston facility with tragic results as the parachute reportedly opened but she did a hard landing.

Champion Australian skydiver Melissa Porter dies in Texas, US https://t.co/GHOpai0XIs pic.twitter.com/rJodI4gH3g

— Daily Mail US (@DailyMail) July 3, 2023

“She’s my baby and she’s not coming home,” Porter’s mother Vinnie said. “That was her happy place. She’ll forever be in the sky roaming the world now.”

“Skydiving was her life,” coach Kristina Hicks told The West Australian. “She was loving (living in Texas) and being part of the diving community over there where there were opportunities to progress and work with some of the best divers in the world.”

In a “swoop landing,” the jumper performs maneuvers which increase the speed of the parachute, or canopy, so the jumper flies over the ground or water rapidly. The jumper creates “a surge that drives the canopy towards the ground. … Swoopers do this with just enough time to level out and stylishly glide across the ground,” SkyDive Monroe explains.

Porter reportedly fell in love with skydiving after watching her grandmother skydive. She took her first tandem skydive on her 14th birthday.

After she and Tassicker won the gold medal, Porter said, “We definitely didn’t expect to win. We only talked about potentially making a team like a few months before the national competition. It was a shock when we took gold but it’s been amazing — it definitely makes me want to compete further.”

“For so long the sport has been male-dominated,” Porter told the Sound Telegraph in March. “There’s this idea that women are too afraid or they’re too small, or they’re too light, all of these things and it’s absolutely not true, they are 100 per cent capable. It’s really cool for me to be able to be an instructor and to show other women it’s doable. I want to continue doing that for years.”

“Because I’ve been a full-time skydiver in the industry for so long, I don’t get a lot of time to ‘fun jump,’” she added.

On May 6, Porter completed the “2-point 23 way,” in which skydivers connect in the air, then let go into a “full break” and then all reconnect. “I am very, very excited to be a part of something like this,” she said before the event. “It’s not something I’ve ever done before and there’s so few of us that have the skillset to do it.”

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) stated, “We send our deepest condolences to the woman’s family.”

Rioters in France drove a car into a suburban mayor’s home before setting it on fire while his wife and two daughters slept inside as violence continued in the country early Sunday morning. 

Vincent Jeanbrun — the mayor of south Paris suburb, L’Haÿ-les-Roses — was at a town hall when rioters attacked his home, but his wife and two young children were chased out by the mob, The Telegraph reported. The local prosecutor called the attack on the mayor’s home and family an “assassination attempt,” which came during the latest round of riots that have rocked the country in the wake of police shooting a 17-year-old Algerian Muslim.

“Last night a milestone was reached in horror and disgrace,” Jeanbrun said. “My wife and one of my children were injured. It was an attempted murder of unspeakable cowardice.”

Rioters allegedly chased Jeanbrun’s wife, Melanie Nowak, and her two children, ages 5 and 7, into the backyard while shooting mortar fireworks at them. Nowak eventually got her children over a wall and into their neighbor’s yard, but she fractured her leg while trying to escape, and one of her children was also injured. Jeanbrun said his wife is recovering in the hospital.

France Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin vowed to bring justice for the “victims of a cowardly and terrible attack.” Authorities found a plastic bottle that contained fire accelerant at the scene, and police have launched an investigation into attempted murder. 

“An investigation for attempted murder has been opened and significant resources of the judicial police are mobilized. The perpetrators of these facts will answer for their heinous acts,” Darmanin tweeted. 

Over the weekend, riots were reported from Paris — where a dozen buses were burned and store windows were smashed along the rue de Rivoli — all the way to Roubaix in the north and Marseille in the south as well as Reims and Lyon. In Drancy, a Paris suburb, a shopping mall was burned; and in Marseilles, the country’s largest library was burned. The headquarters of the Paris 2024 Olympics in Seine-Saint-Denis was set on fire.

More than 700 people were arrested Saturday night throughout the country, according to The Telegraph, which Darmanin called a “calmer night.” France deployed 45,000 police to counter the rioting, but that didn’t stop mobs from setting more than 800 fires throughout the night Saturday, the BBC reported. Jeanbrun has called for the French government to declare a state of emergency, which would give authorities more power to arrest suspects and implement curfews, but President Emmanuel Macron has so far declined to do so. 

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Hank Berrien contributed to this report.