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A tragic shower accident took the life of a 9-year-old Brooklyn girl Thursday night.
Gariella Illias was taking a shower around 9 p.m. Thursday night when she somehow managed to become strangled by the shower cord. Details are still sketchy, and an initial autopsy was inconclusive, but by all accounts Gabriella's death was completely unexpected - though because of the nature of the death the police are not yet ruling out suicide. "'She was excited for school the next day because she was due to eat lunch with her teacher as a reward for filling up her "star chart,"; A relative told the Post.
Gabriella had tried to take a shower earlier but found the water too cold, so she put on a towel and joined her family watching TV in the living room, said grandfather Rudy Reyes. After her mom checked the water and found it hot enough, the little girl went in for her shower.Ten minutes passed, and her mom, noticing the lights and TV were off in the living room, opened the bathroom door to check up on her daughter - and found the girl kneeling with the cord wrapped around her neck.
"It wasn't tied, it was just around her neck," Reyes said. "She got hung up in there."
The girl wasn't fully kneeling on the tub but she wasn't hanging either, he said. Her fingers were lodged between the cord and her neck, as though she had been trying to pull it off.
Gothamist's prayers go out to the Illias family.
Detail from "Banality" from KAGoldberg's flickr stream.
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How in the world can the police suspect a nine-year old girl of committing suicide? That's sick.
Could she have been the latest victim "the choking game" which some kids (stupidly) enjoy playing?
what's a soda fountain hose doing in a shower?
B,
It's sad to say, but kids do sometimes kill themselves. Obviously it's very uncommon among suicides, but it still happens.
I'm sorry, but how can I believe the kid strangled herself? If the hose wasn't even tied around her neck, as they say, she could have got out. I hate to say it, but when a kid dies in an improbable way, it's usually because the story was concocted by her abusive parents. I really HOPE that's not the case, but it's what immediately came to mind.
This was extremely sad and absolutely bizarre. What makes this all the stranger for me is that, about one month earlier, I had a very compelling and very dark thought about our own shower cord (exactly like the one shown in this article). The thought suddenly came to me that someone could get strangled by that cord.
Now we have had this same shower cord for at least three years and suddenly without warning the thought hit me 'out of nowhere'.
It was so strong that, for that day, I was actually afraid to use the shower! I guess you could say I had shower-cord-aphobia and I'm not a person who normally experiences phobias!
Then, about one month later, the story about the nine year old girl was published. I was shocked.
Stranger things have happened and this does appear to be an accidental and extremely sad death. Don't know if there have been any published follow-ups since this article first came out?