3 teens die at school in central Viet Nam; suicide notes found

From WIRE REPORTS

            Three seventh-grade girls in Viet Nam‘s Central Highlands died at school in what authorities now have strong reason to believe was a group suicide.

            Police from Dak Nong Province found many letters in the girls’ bags detailing their plan to die together.

            A local newspaper report cited several entries in a diary of Nguyen Nu My Hanh, one of the girls, which described a depression she never shared with her family, and that she was planning to commit suicide.

            “Today I’m almost gone after a small problem at class. Today is so sad,” said one of Hanh’s notes.

            Another one read: “The day is coming. I will have a whole new world of heaven.”

            Their classmates said the girls drank something just before a class meeting. An unfinished bottle of orange juice was found on one of the victims, all 14 years old.

            Hanh and her classmates Nguyen Thi Cam Nhung and Le Thi Bich Loan fainted before being taken to the hospital, where they died soon after.

            Tran Thi Nhai, one of the girls’ teachers at Phan Chu Trinh Secondary School, said the girls were very close, and they were each good and well-behaved students.

            The school teachers and their families said they were shocked by the apparent suicide, as the girls had been kind, joyful and had showed no signs of unhappiness.

            “We were surprised when reading her diary,” Luc Tien Than, a relation of Hanh’s, told Tuoi Tre.

            “It is far different from what she showed at home or when talking with people,” Than said.

            The sense of devastation is especially intense within Loan’s family, as her mother just died over a month ago.

            Le Sy Tuat recalled the morning of his daughter’s death when she still told him that she was going to school as she had so many times before.

            “There was nothing strange. I could not believe it when the school informed me.”

            Nhung’s neighbor Tran Thi Trang, who sold sandwiches to the girl every morning, said, “She was always smiling very brightly. She was very nice and always said goodbye to me after buying the sandwiches.”

            Police have launched further investigations.