Police believe the model who was killed in a bungee jumping accident was wearing a GoPro camera – which they say may have been hidden after her death.
Maria Eduarda Rodrigues de Freitas, 21, was killed last week jumping off Skeleton Bridge and falling 130ft in Limeira, Brazil, without a rope.
Police are now searching for a missing GoPro, which they believe was attached to the model’s neck strap as she fell.
Bungee workers Luis Felipe Feliciano Egoroff, 32, Maicon Fernandes Cintra, 42, and Vitor de Freitas Goncalves, 27, have been arrested after they allegedly ‘forgot’ to clip on Maria’s harness and face homicide charges.
Three more suspects have also been arrested, with police saying one is suspected of removing the camera and deleting crucial evidence from it.
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They include a 29-year-old woman from Rio de Janeiro and two men aged 25 and 27 from Limeira and Indaiatuba, respectively.
Witness Rafael Goulart claimed he saw an employee removing the camera as Maria lay dying.
He told news outlet EPTV: ‘The first scene I remember when I saw the girl on the ground was seeing one of the employees removing the GoPro camera from the neck strap of the body that was already on the ground, either worried about the equipment or wanting to hide evidence.’
São Paulo State authorities are now investigating possible ‘suppression of evidence… especially related to the disappearance of the image capture equipment used by the victim during the jump.’
While Maria’s camera has yet to be found, footage of the fall that killed her has still circulated on social media.
One clip shows her being helped onto a ledge with two men carrying her in a Superman pose before she is thrown off the bridge head-first.
In other footage shared on social media in 2022, Egoroff and another man could be seen throwing a body bag off the very bridge that Maria fell from.
The clip, shared to Egoroff’s Instagram account, was captioned ‘hiding the body’.
In others, he performs bungee stunts off the bridge himself while children cling onto him. One video shared to the platform in 2023 shows a child wearing a helmet and a harness clinging on as a man, thought to be Egoroff, leaps from the bridge.
A lawyer representing Egoroff, Cintra and de Freitas Goncalves has disputed any notion that Maria’s death was intentional.