According to witnesses, those responsible for the rope jump from Ponte do Esqueleto, in Limeira, in the interior of São Paulo, organized the radical activity in an amateur way. A Communication was done through a WhatsApp group called “between strings”, in which some safety guidelines were sent, but the messages had one main theme: tips on how to record videos with the potential to go viral on social media.
On the Saturday that Maria Eduarda Rodrigues de Freitas, aged 21, around 80 tourists would participate in the activity – among them, the pedagogical coordinator Rafael Goulart, who was at the scene at the time of the fall.
According to Goulart, the Participants discovered only after the tragedy that the group responsible for the jumps had no formal registration. “This company, in fact, does not exist. They had no registration, they did not have a CNPJ”, he stated. The report tries to contact the lawyers of those responsible.
“We ended up falling into an operation that had 80 thousand followers and videos with millions of views. After the misfortune happens, we start to look back and realize how disorganized they were,” he stated.
According to Goulart, the The team used to highlight content that had gone viral on social media and explained to participants which elements helped increase the reach of publications.
In one of the audios sent to the group, a member of the organization states that many people sought out the activity precisely because of the repercussion of the videos.
“There are people who look for us because of virality. Because they want to make the video viral”, says the recording. The same person cites the case of a participant identified as Vitória, whose jump would have reached more than 15 million views.
“Vitória has 15 million views, it appeared on several pages (…), because there is a lot of truth and humor in her video”, states the audio. According to the member, spontaneous reactions and funny situations increased the chances of engagement. “Humor goes viral a lot”, he adds.
Security Guidelines
Goulart stated that the team also provided safety instructions to participants. According to him, however, the guidelines conveyed the idea that possible accidents would be the result of mistakes made by the practitioners themselves.
“They gave us safety information, but always placed the responsibility on us. They said that you couldn’t do a pirouette, you couldn’t run, that everything needed to be reported to the instructor. So the impression was that any accident would happen because the participant did something wrong,” he said. “And what we saw was just the opposite: they didn’t put the rope in,” he added.
Maria Eduarda died after being thrown from the bridge without being attached to safety equipment. According to the Civil Police, it should have been connected to two ropes, but none of them were installed.
GoPro disappeared after crash
Another question raised by Goulart involves the disappearance of a GoPro camera that was with the victim at the time of the accident. According to him, some people who were at the scene claim to have seen team members remove equipment from the young woman’s body after the fall.
“If the camera was with her until that moment, why did the camera just disappear and no one found out about it anymore?”, he asked. The Civil Police are investigating the whereabouts of the equipment. The hypothesis raised by the witness is that the camera may have been taken by people who left the area shortly after the accident.
The pedagogical coordinator argues that the case serves to boost the regulation of the activity in the country . Maria Eduarda died on Saturday, 13th, after being thrown from the Skeleton Bridge without being attached to the safety ropes. Three employees responsible for the operation remain arrested. The case is investigated as homicide with possible intent, when the risk of causing death is assumed even without the direct intention to kill.
