West Virginia ? Thousands of people watched a pioneering parachutist jump to his death from a bridge during a festival when his chute opened too late, a sheriff said.

Brian Lee Schubert, 66, died of injuries suffered Saturday when he hit the water 876 feet below the New River Gorge Bridge during West Virginia’s annual Bridge Day festival, said Fayette County Sheriff Bill Laird.

Schubert, from Alta Loma, Calif., had been well known in the sport of BASE jumping since 1966, when he and a friend became the first people to jump from El Capitan, a nearly 3,000-foot-tall rock formation, in California’s Yosemite National Park.

The sport’s acronym stands for the places jumpers usually leap from: buildings, antennae, spans and earth.

Lew Whitener, a newspaper photographer covering the annual Bridge Day festival for the Register-Herald of Beckley, said it appeared Schubert’s chute did not start to open until he was about 25 feet above the water.