OSAKA —

A 2-year-old boy, who survived a fall from the 9th floor of his apartment in March, died Thursday after apparently choking himself with a backpack strap that got tangled on the doorknob of his room at home, police said. Issa Fujita, 2, was found by his mother around 9:20 a.m. on Monday. Police say he accidentally hooked his neck in the backpack strap that was hanging on the doorknob.

His parents took him to hospital, but he died on Thursday morning. The boy had only just recovered from his accident in March when he fell from his apartment balcony.

According to police, the boy’s father left home around 6 a.m. for work and the mother was washing clothes in another room at the time of the incident.

Latest 15 of 44 Total Comments Show All

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  Ah_so at 04:30 PM JST - 16th May

  Surely the mother would have dialled 119 immediately and an ambulance would have come to take the child straight to a casualty unit? Instead the father had time to go home and then take the boy to hospital? Unless the father worked only a stone's throw away from the apartment, this seems very suspicious.

  LFRAgain: The article does not state that the mother ignored the son for 3h20m, but rather that she was doing the washing at the time of the incident.

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  notimpressed at 05:18 PM JST - 16th May

  It just sounds weird for a kid to get his head stuck in a backpack strap and then choke himself with it. One freak accident to many perhaps? Its about as hard to buy the...."oh he accidentally hung himself" line, as it is the "he walked right into my fist ocifer!" one.

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  DXXJP at 06:05 PM JST - 16th May

  Maybe she hung him there while she was mixin up the chemicals.

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  smithinjapan at 06:48 PM JST - 16th May

  This is bogus, and I agree with those who have posted that the whole thing smacks of suspicion. I mean, come on.... a two year old kid managed to reach the door knob with some slack and then hang from it? What's a two-year-old doing with a backpack anyhow?

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  yabits at 08:34 PM JST - 16th May

  What a sad, strange case with lots of unanswered questions. The best that we can say about the mother is that she is criminally negligent. Have these parents never taken basic steps to make their home more safe for a kid? How does a 2-yr-old gain access to a balcony where he can fall 9 stories? Why is a doorknob the place to hang a backpack? These two incidents may in fact be tragic accidents, but from the looks of things they were accidents just waiting to happen.

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  European1 at 09:11 PM JST - 16th May

  Poor kid, he came to this world to die soon. There is something very strange though. Luckily after fall from 9th floor he survived, but now he is gone. Hmmm....was really time for him to leave this world or someone helped him? I think we will never find out.

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  Nessie at 09:30 PM JST - 16th May

  Good questions, Cleo.

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  jonobugs at 11:30 PM JST - 16th May

  I think that the only consistent part of JT is that the stories here are normally bereft of any details. A lot of people here are making a lot of assumptions. Unless you have another source of information, no one here knows how attentive or inattentive the mother truly was.

  As all you parents out there know, it doesn't take 5 minutes for a child to choke to death. It can happen in the span of 30 seconds depending on the circumstances. A 2 year old does not have full control of his body and even if his feet could easily reach the ground he may not have been able to extricate himself from is situation.

  I'm definitely not trying to defend his parents, but just to point out that there is a serious lack of information for anyone to start pointing fingers.

  About the only thing that can truly be said is of the dark and sad irony. It's truly a shame. I feel sorry for him as well as his parents.

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  ca1ic0cat at 02:23 AM JST - 17th May

  I'm 110% with Cleo on this. I agree that we don't have much to go on but this is just too much. I do wonder what the cops think of the whole thing.

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  kokuryu at 05:22 AM JST - 17th May

  This is one strange story. They make it sound like the kid committed suicide, then make it sound like the mother killed him. You dont know which way to think.... But it all sounds suspicious to me.

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  LFRAgain at 04:54 PM JST - 17th May

  Cleo,

  Good point. I suppose it is rather strange that the father didn't just say, "Okay, I'll meet you at the hospital." Which just makes this that much stranger.

  Ah_so,

  "At the time of the incident" is when precisely? According to the information in the article, the child wasn't discovered until 9:20AM, 3 hours and 20 minutes after the father left for work in the morning. At 9:20, the mother stopped doing laundry long enough to find her child had hanged himself.

  For all we know, the child could have had the accident at 6:01AM and been hanging there that entire time. Or he could have got tangled up at 9:15AM and expired just as his mother found him. And that's the point. No one can say for sure because no one was watching a 2-year old who just a scant month and a half ago took a dive from the 9th floor balcony. That sounds an awful lot to me like nobody was paying any attention to (e.g., ignoring) the child for 3 hours and 20 minutes. In what way do you read this differently?

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  pathat at 10:56 PM JST - 17th May

  Weve done our fair share of bashing the Japanese police on JT over the years, and usually with good reason, but something tells me that this time the police are already asking a lot of the same questions posed by concerned people here. I cannot believe the police would be so daft as to not see the suspicious circumstances surrounding these terrible incidents and the childs death. One way or the other, though, the child is gone.

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  capparapha at 06:50 AM JST - 20th May

  Distraught parents can sometimes be irrational, why, cause they are distraught, duh.

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  keshii at 01:38 PM JST - 22nd May

  And that mother - honestly, even if you're doing laundry, a Japanese apartment is pretty small. She should have heard the sounds of a struggling child choking. Even if he couldn't scream, he was probably kicking, etc. He is a toddler, after all. But to let the toddler be in another room - not sleeping! - unsupervised is so irresponsible, and ESPECIALLY after an accident earlier in the year, you'd have thought she'd learned her lesson.

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  Sarge at 01:42 PM JST - 22nd May

  "What's a two-year-old doing with a backpack anyhow?"

  Yeah, that kid should be strapped to his crib 24 hours a day to keep him out of trouble!

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