Just hours before she plummeted to her death off a 130ft bridge in Brazil, 21-year-old Maria Eduarda Rodrigues de Freitas took to Instagram, as she did most days.
The aspiring physical education teacher maintained an active online presence, posting selfies at the gym, and close-ups to document almost every aspect of her daily life.
Investigators now believe she personally documented the precise moment of her death in terrifying bird’s-eye-view footage of the fall.
Moments before Freitas was launched from the abandoned bridge ‘airplane style,’ with two instructors holding her above their shoulders as she fully spread out her arms, she was apparently given a GoPro camera to document her descent.
The Brazilian woman was sporting a helmet and appeared to be wearing a harness, but she was completely unattached to the structure when workers tossed her over the edge.
Investigators believe that the missing camera, which has seemingly become the focus of the case, could have the unimaginable footage showing Freitas’ deadly descent.
Local pedagogist Rafael Goulart, who was waiting in line when Freitas plummeted from the bridge, claimed one of the bungee jump workers had approached her motionless body after the fall.
‘They were worried about the equipment, either to hide evidence or because of its financial value,’ he told TV Globo.
Andrea Dantas Levy, the police chief in charge of the case, said Monday that the vital camera in question may have been taken. During questioning, no one had been able to explain where it was so far.
‘Honestly, I don’t think it’s still there, given the number of people who came to the bridge later to look for it,’ Levy said.
‘I believe that, unfortunately, someone may have taken the camera,’ she continued.
Levy explained that she had been at the scene with the forensic team but had not found the camera in question, according to G1.
The police chief added that the camera belonged to the organizers, which she added ‘cannot be called a company,’ and had been with Freitas during the fatal incident.
‘It’s likely that during the fall, it slipped out of the victim’s hand, even though it was strapped to her wrist,’ Levy said.
Brazilian authorities have arrested the three men – Luis Felipe Feliciano Egoroff, 32, Vitor de Freitas Gonçalves, 27, and Maicon Fernandes Cintra, 42 – who held Freitas over their heads.
They have been charged with homicide with eventual intent – but one of the suspects, Egoroff, has already said that he did not recall what happened before the incident.
‘I went first, and after that, it got erased from my mind,’ Egoroff said in a deposition obtained by CNN Brazil. ‘I can’t remember.’
Gonçalves told authorities that Freitas’ death was ‘truly a fatality,’ per the outlet.
However, he insisted that ‘no one leaves home intending to do something like that.’
During a custody hearing held on Sunday, Enrico Paisani, a representative of the São Paulo public prosecutor’s office, confirmed that Freitas was holding the GoPro when she was thrown off the bridge, CNN Brazil reported.
Judge Paulo Henrique Stahlberg Natal, who is overseeing the case, has also noted that the camera attached to Freitas at the time of her fall has not been found.
Rafael Gomes dos Santos, the attorney representing the bungee jump instructors, claimed that someone could have taken the missing GoPro.
‘There was a crowd of people there,’ Gomes dos Santos said, according to Folha de São Paulo.
Gomes dos Santos also said that the instructors were shaken and that they had been doing this for years without anything similar happening, according to BBC Brazil.
In a television interview, he claimed that his clients did not know how to explain that Freitas had been hurled off the bridge without any attachments.
The judge, Natal, wrote that instructors had failed to follow basic protocols, such as double-checking, before Freitas’ fatal fall.
‘By failing to attach the safety rope, essential equipment for preventing death, and by failing to realize the mandatory pre-dive check, the defendants assumed the risk that the victim would fall in free fall and passed away,’ Natal said.
He stunningly claimed that technical instructions had not been relayed prior to the death.
Goulart, the pedagogist waiting in the bungee jump line when Freitas died, blasted the incident as a ‘disgrace.’
Calling Freitas’ death an ‘assassination’ Goulart directly took aim at those in charge of the bungee jumping operation.
‘They killed the girl,’ he told Metrópoles TV. ‘It was not an accident. It was not a security fail. They simply did not do the bare minimum for the sport to happen.’
Goulart added: ‘The name of the sport is rope jump. It’s jumping with a rope. They didn’t use a rope.’
In video that circulated after Freitas’ death, bystanders could be heard yelling out, ‘the rope, people, the rope’, as employees let go of the young woman.
‘The first scene I remember was seeing one of the employees removing the GoPro camera strap from the neck of the body that was already on the ground,’ Goulart told TV Globo.
The men in the video showing Freitas’ death wore t-shirts with the logos of ‘Entre Cordas’ and ‘Ih Voei.’
According to local police, the names of those groups linked back to informal practitioners, G1 reported.
However, there were no actual official companies behind the jumping operation.
The three men were allegedly a group of sports enthusiasts who began organizing events in various locations roughly one year ago.
Freitas’ mother, Valdenia Rodrigues, broke her silence to pay a heartbreaking tribute to her ‘princess’ on social media after the weekend’s tragedy.
‘My beloved daughter, today alone I wanted to hug you more than a thousand times,’ Rodrigues wrote. ‘How much your departure hurts me. I love you eternally, my princess. And thank you so much for being a part of my life for these 21 years.
‘What an honor it was to hear you call me mom. God, thank you for this privilege,’ she wrote.
On Saturday around 7.31am, Freitas posted a shot of the Skeleton Bridge in Limeira, São Paulo, writing, ‘Who was the crazy person who let me come jump off a bridge???’ It would be one of her last posts.
