May not have lied. IIRC, oddly enough, “decapitation” doesn’t necessarily mean someone’s head came off: simply popping the neck vertebrae apart is referred to as some sort of decapitation medically.
I read that the boy's head arrived at the bottom of the slide before the body. This was according to a worker at the ride. The steel support frame for the safety netting is what caused the injury.
A Dale Earnhardt injury - separation of head and spinal cord without necessarily separating head from rest of body
There is such a thing as “internal decapitation” where your head separates from the spinal column but the flesh is fully intact.
One of my coworkers had this happen to her when she fell out of a moving truck. It didn’t kill or paralyze her but it could have if it hadn’t been caught. She was very, very lucky.