Man Assisted High School Student To Kill Herself By Helping Her Jump From Bridge

A man was arrested after he allegedly helped a junior high school student jump to her death from a bridge in Sagamihara City, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan.

The suspect, identified as 28-year-old Yuya Nozaki, a company employee living in Saitama City, Japan, became acquainted with the victim, a junior high school student, on a social networking site where people post comments hinting at having suicidal thoughts, Japan Today reported.

Nozaki reportedly met the girl in Saitama on Sept 20. The girl’s parents reported her missing on Sept 21. Two days later, on the night of Sept 23, Nozaki drove the girl to the mountains in Sagamihara City’s Midori Ward, where the girl apparently jumped from a bridge and committed suicide.

The girl’s body was found days later floating in a river near Lake Sagami on Sept 29. An investigation into the missing person report revealed a street surveillance camera footage of the victim and Nozaki together. The officers also found messages that Nozaki and the girl had exchanged on social media.

Following this, Nozaki was initially arrested on Sept 27 on suspicion of kidnapping a minor. However, since the girl's body was discovered, Nozaki was charged with assisted suicide after Nozaki admitted to suggesting to the girl how to take her own life.

In a similar but unrelated incident, an 18-year-old girl reportedly killed herself after her parents failed to buy her an iPhone in Nagpur, Maharashtra, India on Friday, Sept. 30, as previously reported.

The deceased girl, a first-year degree student at Raisoni College in Hingna town, Nagpur, had repeatedly asked her parents to buy her an iPhone for the past several months. After her persistent demands to buy her the phone, her parents finally accepted her demand and promised to buy her a new iPhone.

However, due to the delay in purchasing the iPhone, the girl presumed that her parents were not going to buy her the phone. Upset and depressed over this, the girl decided to end her life and allegedly committed suicide by hanging herself from a ceiling fan in the bedroom of her house in the Kharbi area of Nagpur city on Friday, Sept. 30 evening.

Following her suicide, police officers responded to the scene, recorded the statement of the deceased girl's father, and registered a case of accidental death in connection with the incident.