😱💔 MARIA EDUARDA STILL ALIVE FOR MOMENTS — NURSE HAUNTED BY HER FIRST WORDS A nurse at the scene of the Skeleton Bridge tragedy revealed that 21-year-old Maria Eduarda Rodrigues de Freitas was still alive immediately after her fatal fall. What she said first left the nurse shaken — a haunting detail that has stunned everyone following the incident. 📌 Full story and eyewitness account in comments 👇

Hurled 130ft off Skeleton Bridge with no harness

The troubling questions surrounding the death of a Brazilian 21-year-old that left everyone who watched that viral video asking: HOW on earth did no one notice?

As three men lift Maria Eduarda Rodrigues de Freitas into the air, it’s clear that something is seriously wrong.
The 21-year-old student is about to take part in a bungee-style rope swing off a 130ft-high bridge in rural southern Brazil. Except, the rope designed to catch her fall has not been attached to her harness – what’s more, no one seems to have noticed.
Maria extends her arms out into the ‘airplane position’ as two of the men carry her, above their heads, to the very edge of the abandoned railway viaduct – known as Skeleton Bridge – outside the city of Limeira in Sao Paulo state. They tilt her over the precipice, pause for the briefest moment, and then let go.
Horrified onlookers can be heard screaming as Maria falls helplessly to the ground. The camera then tilts down to reveal the safety rope coiled at the top of the bridge before the footage cuts out.

The young woman was in freefall for just 2.9 seconds before hitting the ground at more than 60mph. In other words, no time to realise what had happened. Except, in a further horrific twist, Duda – as she was known to friends – did not die immediately upon impact.
‘I saw that she was breathing heavily, her pupils were unfortunately dilated, and her pulse was very weak, but she still had a pulse,’ revealed off-duty nurse Rayza Dias, who also happened to be at the rope swing event and rushed to Maria’s aid. ‘I even spoke to her. I always joke that nobody dies on my shift, and I told her: “Duda, nobody dies on my shift.”’
Sadly, although an emergency services helicopter attended the scene, there was nothing that could be done to save Maria who died from ‘multiple traumatic injuries’.

40m
(130ft)

View from the ledge: The Ponte do Esqueleto – part of a railroad project abandoned 30 years ago – had also gained notoriety as a suicide hotspot, prompting years of calls for authorities to take action
The implausible nature of Maria’s death has made headlines around the world. How on earth could those in charge have failed to notice the rope was not attached to the young woman’s harness? Not least because they had already overseen six successful jumps that morning.
To answer this question and more, the Daily Mail travelled to Brazil this week where grief has given way to outrage. For, damningly, in an exclusive interview with this newspaper, the president of the country’s rope-swinging association argues that what happened shortly before 10am on Saturday, June 13 was not an accident but an act of criminal negligence.
But let’s start with what we know.

What was meant to have happened

The start

Participants undergo safety and equipment checks. They include an instructor fitting a rope from the nearby anchor point to their harness while another checks it has been fitted properly. Once completed, they then move to the platform.

The jump

Like bungee, participants then jump or fall from the concrete ledge. Inexperienced jumpers should jump on their own – either facing forward or backward. The height of the platform will determine the speed of the drop.

The swing

As participants drop through air their free fall is then caught when the rope becomes taut and swings them upwards in a pendulum-like arc.

The finish

Once the swinging stops, the participant will likely be lowered to the ground and released by waiting ground crew.

The extreme sport is hugely popular in Brazil with more than 50 licensed operators working across the country. However – as we will return to later – those responsible for Maria’s death did not have a licence and were nothing more than a group of friends out to make a quick buck.
Skeleton Bridge – where the incident took place – is part of an uncompleted rail network owned by the Brazilian government. The Daily Mail understands that the Secretariat for Federal Assets had denied permission for its use by extreme sports enthusiasts due to safety concerns. However, local people in nearby Limeira – a city of just over 300,000 inhabitants – told the Daily Mail that the viaduct had been used by adrenaline junkies for ‘over a decade’– and often with horrific consequences.
In fact, Maria’s was the fourth death here in the past three years. In 2024 a cyclist lost balance and plummeted from the bridge, while according to local councillor Bruna Magalhães there have also been a number of suicides.

Maria Eduarda Rodrigues de Freitas
Eerily, in August 2025, two young women – around Maria’s age – were seriously injured while undertaking a similar rope swing.
Limeira mayor Murilo Félix has since announced the city hall’s intention to sue the federal government for negligence after claiming they repeatedly warned that the bridge represented a major safety risk.
When the Daily Mail visited Skeleton Bridge this week, police had cordoned the area off and four large JCB diggers were erecting 15ft-high mounds of earth to prevent access.

N

BRAZIL

Skeleton Bridge

Campinas

Itu

Jundiaí

Jandira,
Maria’s hometown

São Paulo

Santos

20mi

Down below, where Maria fell, cattle were grazing around the fresh tyre tracks left by those who raced to the young woman’s aid. Flocks of Brazil’s iconic black vultures circled overhead.
Things would have looked very different seven days ago, however, when 100 people descended on the bridge chasing a cheap thrill. The event, arranged by six rope swinging ‘enthusiasts’, had been advertised on social media with tickets costing between 130 and 180 reais (£19-£27) each.
We know that Maria – who lived two hours away in the city of Jandira – was excited about attending.

‘Which crazy person let me come and jump off a bridge???’
Just hours before the jump, at 7:31am, Maria’s tongue-in-cheek message posted to Instagram

Initial reports claimed Maria attended with her fiance. However, I can now reveal – following conversations with her family – that Maria was not in fact engaged and did not even have a partner.
‘We don’t know where the rumour came from,’ brother Juan told the Daily Mail on the family’s behalf. ‘She’d been in a relationship with a man for about eight months but they had broken up.’
This then begs the question of who was Maria with that morning, and who was the ‘crazy person’ who encouraged her to take part in the extreme sport?
While this remains unclear, we do know the identities of the three men responsible for failing to attach her to the rope swing.

From left to right: Maicon Fernandes Cintra, 42, Vitor de Freitas Gonçalves, 27, and Luis Felipe Feliciano Egoroff, 32 have all been detained and are under investigation for manslaughter
In a bizarre testimony Luis Felipe told detective Andrea Levy: ‘I can’t remember who was supposed to attach the rope. Sometimes one person would fit the equipment, another would check it. There wasn’t one specific person responsible.’
The plot thickened when a video Luis shared to social media four years ago resurfaced this week. In the appalling footage, Luis is seen hurling a stuffed black bin bag off of Skeleton Bridge alongside the caption: ‘Dumping a Body.’ While no doubt it was originally intended as a joke, no one is laughing now.

A video posted on Luis’s Instagram account in September 2022 showed the moment that rope jump instructors hurled a body bag off the Skeleton Bridge
For his part, the youngest of the three detained men, Vitor, claims he did not ‘have the authority to inspect the equipment’. Meanwhile, the third man Maicon argued: ‘It’s hard to understand how this happened. It’s impossible to understand at what moment I failed to see the rope, because it is very visible since it is attached at chest level.’
Vitally, while the men wore matching T-shirts bearing the slogan ‘Entre Cordas’ (Between Ropes) – and had hosted similar events previously – they did not have a licence to conduct extreme sports. A lawyer for the group has since argued they’d never had any safety issues previously and Maria’s death was a ‘tragic accident’.
Not everyone agrees. In an impassioned interview with the Daily Mail, Marco Antonio Junior – president of the Brazilian Rope Jump Association (BRJA) – said he ‘reject[s] the classification of this case as an accident’.
‘An accident presupposes that the activity is being carried out by qualified individuals, with technical expertise, proper safety equipment and a structure designed to minimise risks.
‘Entre Cordas was not a properly registered company. It was a group of friends who got together and made up a name. We warned the city government that they did not know what they were doing and that they were going to make serious mistakes. That is why, in my view, this constitutes a case of homicide with eventual intent, because they knew they lacked the necessary knowledge and expertise, but they believed otherwise.’

What went wrong on Skeleton Bridge

The missing rope

Rope jumpers are equipped with a helmet and a body harness which should be attached to a safety cord prior to the jump. Footage shows Maria was wearing a helmet and harness when she was thrown off the Skeleton Bridge but the rope was not secured to the harness. In police interviews, the two instructors charged over the death claimed they experienced a ‘mental blackout’ during the safety process and could not explain why there was a failure to secure the rope.

No double-check

The BRJA’s Marco Antonio Junior, known as Jota, said the jump failed to meet minimum safety standards. He explained instructors leading adventure activities should complete a double-check, where one instructor attaches the rope to the participant and another checks that it has been fitted correctly.

The rigging

Additionally, Jota said it is the responsibility of instructors to measure the rope and adjust it to its required length before each jump is carried out in a role known as the ‘rigger’. ‘It’s not enough to just put the person on the line and trust that the rigger set the rope to the right height, because riggers are human and can make mistakes. The rigger takes their measurements, but it is the instructor’s duty to go to the edge of the platform, grab the rope, and verify the measurement themselves. They did nothing. Nothing. The truth is, they have no protocol,’ Jota said.

The airplane jump

The footage shows Maria was carried to the platform by three men with her arms stretched wide and launched in what has been described as an ‘airplane’ manoeuvre. Investigators say she was scheduled to perform the first airplane jump of the day after another woman apparently backed out of doing so. The manoeuvre is said to be not ideal for beginners as it can cause some to become nervous about the height and lose their balance, which can pose a risk to the instructors. The recommended practice is for the participant to jump on their own – either facing forward or backward – after a final equipment check by professionals.

Final cross-check

An instructor, named Gustavo, who was on the site at the time of Maria’s death, claims the rope should have been attached before she was lifted up by instructors. During his police interview, Gustavo said he was unsure who was responsible for checking the rope before she was placed in an overhead position. Jota adds the initial safety briefing should have instructed the jumper on being secured before approaching the platform edge. ‘If the briefing had taken place, the victim herself could have identified the flaw,’ he said.

Intriguingly, because she paid the full price of 180 reais, Maria was fitted with a GoPro to capture footage from her jump. Whatever the camera recorded will surely paint a better picture of exactly how all safety checks were so egregiously missed. And yet, police have been unable to recover the camera from the scene leading to speculation that it may have been deliberately removed. The three men since arrested have denied doing so.
Earlier this week the Daily Mail visited Jandira, the small city outside Sao Paulo where Maria Eduarda lived alongside her mother and other members of her extended family, including two younger sisters and 17-year-old brother, Juan. It is also where Maria worked at the Panobianco Silverstone gym as she chased her dream of becoming a PE teacher.

‘My beloved daughter, today alone I wanted to hug you more than a thousand times. Your departure hurts so much. I love you forever, my princess. Thank you for being part of my life for these 21 years. What an honour it was to hear you call me “mother”. God, thank you for this privilege.’
Her mother Valdenia Maria Rodrigues’ post on social media

The family live in an impoverished neighbourhood, similar to the many favelas that line the outskirts of major Brazilian cities. Homes here are basic, many with missing windows and doors, constructed on steep inclines on top of one another from hastily arranged bricks and exposed concrete. Telephone wires hang low and hungry dogs yap at the tyres of passing cars.
On his family’s behalf, Maria’s brother Juan told the Daily Mail they did not want to talk with the press. However, he did reveal their grief has been compounded by appalling conspiracies spread online.
Juan himself, a promising Muay Thai fighter with more than 6,000 Instagram followers, had his account deleted by Meta after members of the public accused him of only pretending to be Maria’s brother in order to become famous.
He also revealed that conspiracies were spreading online that the video of Maria’s death had been created by artificial intelligence. In posts seen by the Daily Mail, some users even accused the family of life insurance fraud, despite a total absence of evidence.
Most insidious of all have been the social media comments of a sexual nature – which this newspaper has chosen not to share. On Monday this week, federal congresswoman Erika Hilton demanded a cybercrime investigation into users of X who had posted obscene comments that ‘not only insult the victim’s memory, but explicitly encourage, celebrate or treat with humour and approval acts of sexual violence against her corpse’.
As renowned Brazilian columnist Mariliz Pereira Jorge put it: ‘Maria Eduarda’s death did not end when she hit the ground. It continues on social media, where mourning has given way to explicit crimes, including attacks on the honour of her memory, glorification of sexual violence and a disgusting incitement to the desecration of her corpse.’
As if to emphasise the exploitation of Maria’s death online, when the Daily Mail visited the young woman’s grave last week, we encountered a 50-year-old man who was live-streaming footage of the resting place to his 30,000 TikTok followers.

Maria’s grave itself was adorned with flowers and biblical passages at a funeral service on June 14
When asked why on earth he would do such a thing, Gilson Periero revealed he filmed graves regularly and had built a dedicated audience.
The grave itself was adorned with bouquets of flowers and biblical passages at a funeral service on Sunday, June 14. According to a cemetery employee, the service was administered by a Catholic priest and saw the family offer their own prayers. Understandably, the family told the Daily Mail they have no intention of visiting Skeleton Bridge to pay further respects.
‘She was a very good girl, very intelligent, very active. She had all her dreams ahead of her,’ revealed Valdineir Barbosa – Maria’s former PE teacher at the Terezinha Polloni State School – shortly after the funeral service. ‘From the videos we’ve seen, there were three instructors. Did nobody notice [the rope]? It’s heartbreaking. In my humble opinion, these instructors were not prepared. You cannot carry out an extreme sport in this way without checking all the safety equipment.’
It appears, however, that Maria’s death will spark change. Congressman Capitao Alden has proposed a new law around rope swinging which would require mandatory double-checking of safety equipment, technical supervision and formal certification that all gear has been properly installed and inspected before anyone is allowed to take part.
Fittingly, the proposed legislation has been named the Maria Eduarda Rodrigues de Freitas Law. And yet, this new law – however comprehensive – will never explain or excuse the negligence that led to the death of the woman whose name it bears.