2-yr-old boy who survived 9th floor fall in March dies after choking himself with backpack strap
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.
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rjd_jr
Where were the parents!! The parenting in this place sometimes....
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smartacus
I vaguely remember reading about the March accident, which not have been an accident, after all.
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himasan
They had their chance the first time, WATCH YOUR DAMN KIDS. poor family
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cleo
Heard this on the news last night - fall from the 9th floor in March, then choking to death on a doorknob in May?? Mr Cleo and I looked at each other and agreed that this had a definite stink.
I hope the authorities take a closer look at this family.
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PostOfReason
This does not sound legit. I hope the police look into this very carefully.
My heart is a beating a little less at the loss of this poor boys life. May he rest in peace.
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Fair dinkum!
A very sad accident. It is easy to say the mother was inattentive, but it's also impossible to watch two year olds every second, although, common sense does tell one that, if a two year old is quiet something is amiss.
I guess the gods must have really wanted this kid.
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cleo
This was a two-year-old who had only just recovered from a scape with death a couple of months ago. If he were mine I don't think I would have been able to let him out of my sight. Let the washing go hang.
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Fair dinkum!
Yeah, but a kid recovering from a major injury is less likely to be up to no good, which has 'probably' lead to his mother's complacency. It's like the old joke - Where do you find a dog with no legs?..... Right where you left it.
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whatanidiot
if it is really an accident, a boy recovering, in his bedroom, if i were the mother, i would have let him rest, and play as a 2 years old, and come to check on him at times to make sure he doesnt need anything... but i dont think the mother can be blamed here... they were home... she didnt let him play out side or in a park without looking at him...
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romulus3
an accidental fall from the 9th floor and then a hanging? Romulus don't like it. Lightening doesn't strike twice. I suspect infanticide.
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toolongheremaybe
Unfortunately Cleo, we think alike. As soon as I read the headline a chill went down my spine. This could possibly be extremely terrible bad luck, but I doubt it. It's either one super genki kid who is hard to handle, or the parents are really remiss. Everyone who has kids can tell of near misses, but this doesn't add up. If the mother is not responsible she will be unconsolable for years, but no, this is most likely foul play. If police didn't really investigate this there is something wrong.
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Spidey
I never thought I would ever be saying this but I have to agree with whatanidiot.
Leaving the little one secure in his room while doing household chores is perfectly normal. The fact that he hung himself on his backpack while it was hanging up was a freak accident to say the least. I don't think any of us parents could have seen that coming. Until now of course. Falling from his balcony however could possibly have been avoided. How he survived a 9 storey fall I'll never know.
Rest in peace little angel
S
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franz75
The second murder attempt was successfull too me...
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KaptainKichigai
Did anybody see Final Destination? You cant cheat death.
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romulus3
KaptainKichigai,
especially when you are 2 and an adult is determined to kill you.
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timorborder
What is this country coming to? Two year old kids with a death wish! Cleo and friends are definitely correct. Although this "accident" happened down in Osaka, you can smell the stench up here in Tokyo. If Dad was out of the house, the cops should start talking to the mother. "If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck....."
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telecasterplayer
Accident my ***. I'm guessing we'll be hearing about a confession in a week.
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Patrick Smash
This sounds very suspicious. People should stop harping on about inattentive parents. It really only takes a few seconds for a child to get into trouble, but I found this story very hard to believe. There are coincidences, and then there are things like this...
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outofmydepth
a two year old so accident-prone???? i think there should be an investigation. and SOON.
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GG2141
Indeed, very suspicious.
Hope the cops take a long hard look at it. Time to call in CSI and Horatio Whats-his-face to save the day.
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LFRAgain
This really does sound incredibly suspicious. If it were indeed an accident, okay then,wow! what a freak accident. But the kid fell 9 floors only a little over a month ago. WTH is going on in this household?
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kronjp
I smell a rat! It'll be hard to prove even if there was foul play...watch this space.
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Coligny
On one side... this sound really like a murder case... on the other side... as someone who live in a bombproof building with laundry room two stairs away from the bedroom. I can understand that bad things can happen when you do the laundry, especially a 9am when you expect the kid to actually sleep. And the little guy seemed to be on the hyperactive side.
Hell last time my wife detonated something in the kitchen while trying to cook i was 2 rooms away and thought it was a cat farting on my knees. Only the lack of that typical foul smell replaced by a burning-thing one told me something was amiss.
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Fair dinkum!
I agree, it does seem a bit suspicious, but no one in this forum is in a position to make a judgment based on the facts available. We all know what happens when you assume something. You make an ass out of u and me.
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LFRAgain
True enough...
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KyouNoNippon
I agree with Cleo.
Cleo + 1
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Nessie
I'm with Toolong, Cleo and Mr. Cleo. And the mother looks more suspicious of the two parents.
And the father left for work at 6AM, the kid was found at 9:20AM and both parents took the kid to the hospital? That's an awfully short workday for Dad to be back home. Or did mom leave the kid hanging while she called the father to come home? Suspicious no matter how you slice it.
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LFRAgain
It doesn't seem too suspicious for the father to have rushed home after learning his son had a horrible accident. If it were my child, I'd be heading home like a bat out of hell to see what happened. I think any parent would.
What I do wonder is, did anyone other than the mother see the child actually hanging from this alleged backpack strap? Or is that just what she told the hospital staff? The father wasn't home to see it and the mother was apparently washing laundry and ignoring her accident-prone child for 3 hours and 20 minutes that morning. That's an inordinately long amount of time to ignore a 2-year old. So we only have the word of the mother to go by.
I'd also like to know a little more about this child. Was he developmentally on par with his peers? Were there any extenuating circumstances that make temp the parents or the mother to want to get rid of the child? Furthermore, what about the mom? Was she, before this and the previous incident and for lack of a better word, stable?
Regardless of whether there was foul play or not, I'm sad to say I wouldn't be surprised to see another tragedy of the suicide variety in this family in the coming days.
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cleo
Wouldn't you rather expect him to rush to the hospital the child had been rushed to in the ambulance the mother had called immediately she found the boy hanging from the doorknob?
Do you call the ambulance, or do you call the father and ask what to do? Then wait until he comes home before doing it?
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Ah_so
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
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
Maybe she hung him there while she was mixin up the chemicals.
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smithinjapan
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
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
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
Good questions, Cleo.
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jonobugs
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
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
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
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
We
ve 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.0
capparapha
Distraught parents can sometimes be irrational, why, cause they are distraught, duh.
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keshii
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
"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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