One of the Brazilian bungee jumping instructors charged with sending a student plummeting to her death without a rope had previously filmed a sick stunt while joking about throwing bodies off the same bridge.
Luis Felipe Feliciano Egoroff, 32, filmed and shared a video on Instagram showing him and other instructors hurling a black bag made to look like a dead body off Skeleton Bridge, reported Brazilian outlet O Globo.
The video, titled “Hiding the body,” was posted on social media in September 2022, almost four years before Maria Eduarda Rodrigues de Freitas, 21, was thrown to her death without a safety rope Saturday off the same bridge in Limeira, São Paulo state.
The twisted clip resurfaced in the wake of de Freitas’ death, with many social media users slamming it as poor taste and tagging local authorities, including the São Paulo Civil Police and Public Prosecutor’s Office.
“Prophetic, it finally happened. The girl died as rehearsed… There are things that we shouldn’t play with at all,” one user wrote.
It isn’t clear if the other instructors featured in the dark joke video are Egoroff’s fellow suspects, Vitor de Freitas Gonçalves, 27, and Maicon Fernandes Cintra, 42, who have also been charged with de Freitas’ homicide.
On Tuesday, the trio was transferred from a regional prison to another detention center in São Paulo at the request of their lawyer.
This was done to “preserve the physical integrity of the accused,” their attorney, Rafael Gomes dos Santos, told O Globo.
All three accused claimed they “blacked out” and don’t remember who was supposed to be in charge of attaching the rope to de Freitas, who died after falling 130 feet off the abandoned railway bridge during the illegal unlicensed bungee jump stunt.
“Either it’s me or [Cintra] who does it. So I went ahead first, and after that it’s all erased from my mind… I don’t remember,” Egoroff told Brazil’s EPTV Tuesday.
He insisted he “didn’t see” anyone warning them that de Freitas wasn’t attached to the safety line before they picked her up, airplane style, and hurled her head first off the bridge.
“There was a huge crowd, a lot of people talking, sometimes people go to the jump and start shouting. Like, I didn’t see anything. I saw someone with a video talking about the rope, but like, no, it didn’t go past, I didn’t see it,” he said.
It was a similar story from Cintra, who said he only realized what had happened when other people on the bridge started screaming.
“The reaction … the reaction of the people and even then … I haven’t seen the footage, but I think from that moment on my expression, my reaction at the time was one of disbelief and not understanding what had happened,” he said.
