The rope swing looked inviting. Photos of it on Airbnb brought my family to the cottage in Texas. Hanging from a tree as casually as baggy jeans, the swing was the essence of leisure, of Southern hospitality, of escape. When my father decided to give it a try on Thanksgiving morning, the trunk it was tied to broke in half and fell on his head, immediately ending most of his brain activity.

I was in bed when my mom found him. Her screams brought me down to the yard where I saw the tree snapped in two and his body on the ground. I knelt down and pulled him up by the shoulders. Blood sprayed my blue sweatshirt and a few crumpled autumn leaves. We were face-to-face, but his head hung limply, his right eye dislodged, his mouth full of blood, his tongue swirling around with each raspy breath.

What do you do in this situation? I grabbed a washcloth and started mopping up his leaking face. I told my sister not to come outside. She faints when there’s blood.

“Tell me each time he takes a breath,” the 911 dispatcher said in my ear.

“He’s breathing in; he’s breathing out. He’s breathing in; he’s breathing out.” Saying it aloud like a mantra calmed me down slightly, but was it doing anything for him? I decided to go in for mouth-to-mouth; I ended up with a mouthful of blood.

The EMTs arrived and suctioned the blood away from his face to see the damage. “He’s breathing. His heart is beating,” one of them said, “but it’s very serious.” They called for a helicopter and told us to start driving to Austin.

I scrubbed the blood off my lips and took off my soaking sweatshirt. Everything was blurry — adrenaline makes things that way. So does not putting on your contacts. I popped mine into my eyes and got into the car.

“It’s only a matter of time until something terrible happens,” The New York Times’s Ron Lieber wrote in a 2012 piece examining Airbnb’s liability issues. My family’s story — a private matter until now — is that terrible something.

Since the incident, I’ve felt isolated by the burden of this story and my sense of obligation to go public with it, but with an unclear aim. Am I “raising awareness,” in the familiar path of the victim speaking out? And if so, to what end? What will sharing my story really mean for Airbnb? Could the company, with its reportedly $24 billion valuation and plans to go public, do more to ensure the safety of the properties where millions of guests stay each year? As Airbnb rises into a global hospitality behemoth — reinventing not just how we travel but how we value private space — what responsibility does the company have to those who have given it their dollars and trust?

Startups that redefine social and economic relations pop up in an instant. Lawsuits and regulations lag behind. While my family may be the first guests to speak out about a wrongful death at an Airbnb rental, it shouldn’t exactly come as a surprise. Staying with a stranger or inviting one into your home is an inherently dicey proposition. Hotel rooms are standardized for safety, monitored by staff, and often quite expensive. Airbnb rentals, on the other hand, are unregulated, eclectic, and affordable, and the safety standards are only slowly materializing.

To be fair, Airbnb has always put basic safeguards in place, like user reviews. But its general approach to safety is consistent with Silicon Valley’s “build it first, mend it later” philosophy. When an early product produces negative outcomes and bad press, apologize. Then, fix it; make it better. “We let her down, and for that we are very sorry,” CEO Brian Chesky wrote in 2011, after a San Francisco woman, “EJ,” returned home to find her apartment destroyed, her possessions burned, and her family heirlooms stolen. When her blog post documenting the ordeal went viral, they changed their policy to guarantee $50,000, then $1 million, in property damages and hired enough customer service reps to man the phones 24–7.

Less has been done to protect guests against hosts, presumably because fewer horror stories have gone public. When an American man was bit by a dog left behind at a homeshare in Argentina this March, Airbnb refused to cover his medical expenses until after The New York Times began inquiring. (About that incident, Airbnb told me, “Our initial response didn’t measure up, and we’re constantly auditing our customer service team to ensure these kinds of errors don’t happen. In this case, we worked with the guest to help cover his medical and other expenses, and we provided a full refund of his booking costs.”) Home safety tips were not incorporated into the sign-up process for new properties until after my father’s incident.

Even so, nothing is currently done to make sure hosts actually comply with safety guidelines (or even read them), which is a problem particularly for newer properties on the platform, which Airbnb’s customers, as opposed to employees, are left to vet for safety. Should the company demand more from aspiring hosts — submitting an application, passing a safety quiz, hopping on the phone with an Airbnb safety rep, or undergoing a home inspection (an idea which Chesky himself has suggested) — they’d burden the seamlessness of the minutes-long sign-up process and deter new registrations.