The GoPro Footage of Maria Eduarda Rodrigues’ Fatal Bungee Jump Is Missing, and a Witness Says One of Her Instructors Took It Off Her Body
Here’s what’s now known about the missing camera, per O Globo:
1. Maria Eduarda paid R$150 (about $27) on top of the R$180 jump fee for the footage, sold as an add-on by the operators.
2. The camera was a 360-degree model provided by the company, not her own.
3. Video from bystanders shows her gripping it in one hand as the three instructors threw her off the platform.
4. Investigators did not recover it with her body at the base of the ravine.
5. A witness reported seeing a company employee approach her after the fall and remove the camera from her.
Two of the instructors have told police they had a “blackout” and can’t remember who was supposed to attach the rope.
The 21-year-old physical education graduate was the first customer to jump that Saturday morning at Ponte do Esqueleto, a disused railway bridge in rural São Paulo state. Three instructors lifted her into a horizontal “airplane” pose and threw her off. The rope sat coiled on the platform behind them, never clipped to her harness.
She fell 40 meters. An off-duty nurse climbed down to her through the mud and reached her while she was still breathing. She died at the scene from multiple fractures.
The instructors, Luis Felipe Feliciano Egoroff, Vitor de Freitas Gonçalves, and Maicon Fernandes Cintra, were arrested in flagrante and charged with homicide with eventual intent, which carries 6 to 30 years. A judge converted their detention to preventive custody, citing an attempt to flee and “gross negligence.”
The young man who accompanied her to the bridge, whose relationship to her hasn’t been publicly confirmed, collapsed at the scene and was hospitalized. Police still need to take his statement. The companies the instructors operated under, “Ih Voei” and “Entre Cordas,” deleted their social media accounts after the death.
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