Osamu Ikeda was walking along a street in the busy Ikebukuro district in Tokyo on a day off last month when a woman who was jumping to her death landed on him. Ikeda, a 38-year-old father of two, never regained consciousness and died in hospital several days later..."She should've known she might hit somebody if she jumped when so many people were walking below," said Ikeda's eldest son, a 17-year-old high school student living in western Saitama Prefecture...The police plan to refer her to prosecutors as a dead suspect in a case of gross negligence resulting in death, saying she failed to avert serious consequences she could have predicted might arise from her actions...Police nationwide have, whenever possible, attempted to file criminal charges against people who killed or injured others when taking their own lives...
...However, Tokai Gakuin University Prof. Hirokazu Hasegawa, a researcher of clinical psychology with expertise in the psychological states of people who commit suicide, said police action alone will not prevent similar cases. "Leaping to one's death tends to be done more impulsively than other forms of suicide. Psychologically, people who decide to take their lives this way are beyond considering the possibility of involving and hurting others," Hasegawa said. Owners of buildings from which people jumped to their deaths are trying to prevent a recurrence. Keio department store in Shinjuku, Tokyo, where a suicide leap in 2000 struck a pedestrian walking below, built fences on the roof that bent inward near the top to make them harder to climb over. The University of Electro-Communications installed gates at entrances to emergency staircases that snake up the sides of its buildings, in a bid to prevent people contemplating suicide from climbing to the roofs there...more...