A rope-jumper in Brazil is dead after she was thrown off a bridge without the safety cord attached, and the chilling incident was captured on video.
Maria Eduarda Rodrigues de Freitas, 21, was the victim of the horrifying incident at Ponte do Esqueleto, near Limeira, Sao Paulo, on Saturday morning.
Footage circulating on social media shows the woman wearing a helmet and what appears to be a harness. However, the rope attached to the bridge was coiled on the ground, not connected to her or her harness.
One clip shows three workers hoisting the woman over their heads, with one holding her legs, another her torso, and the third her shoulders, as she is splayed facedown in a Superman pose before being hurled over the edge.
Another video angle shows the young woman's actual fall to her death. Immediately after she was thrown off the bridge, people can be heard shouting, 'the rope!' when they realized the safety equipment had not been connected, according to G1.
The woman fell from a height of 40 metres and was pronounced dead at the scene by emergency response teams. Her body was recovered from the trail below and taken to Legal Medical Institutes for further investigation.
A witness, who was supposed to jump right after the victim, told investigators that the instructors did not perform a safety check when it was Rodrigues de Freitas' turn to jump.
Others at the scene, along with the Civil Police, said there was a serious failure in the equipment check and that the instructors simply forgot to connect the safety system to the woman.
Moments before her jump, Rodrigues de Freitas shared her jump wristbands on her Instagram stories and wrote: 'Who was the crazy person who let me come jump off a bridge?'
The woman's fiancé was on hand to witness the tragedy and had to be taken to hospital. Rodrigues de Freitas was buried the following day.
Skeleton Bridge Has Long Been Problematic
Skeleton Bridge, where the tragedy occurred, has been abandoned for years and falls under responsibility of the federal government. Brazil's Secretariat of Federal Assets said it was 'available to assist the authorities in the investigations.'
The City Hall of Limeira said in a statement that it would be suing the federal government for failing to adequately manage the bridge, noting it 'had been adopting administrative measures and demanding action from the federal agencies responsible for the area.'
Limeira Mayor Murilo Félix added that Rodrigues de Freitas' death 'makes the continuation of this omission unsustainable and unacceptable.'
Local officials said the instructors belonged to a private company that offered rope-jumping activities, though other reports suggested they belonged to informal groups of practitioners.
'Shouldn't Have Been There'
'It was a team there that wasn't regulated; they didn't even have authorization to be there,' Delegate Andrea Dantas Levy told O Globo.
'They ended up organizing this event, and this fatality happened today, in my perception, due to a failure to verify and supervise the placement of the rope on the victim's jump,' Levy added.
The suspects' legal teams told the outlet that the workers were very experienced and this had been the company's first fatality in years. However, they were arrested when they were unable to explain the error or why final security checks weren't conducted for Rodrigues de Freitas' jump.
Two of the suspects fled the area but were later tracked down by helicopter in the wooded area, according to G1. In total, six people were arrested, three of whom were charged with homicide with implied malice.
