A 52-year-old man has been sentenced to four months and four weeks in jail for stealing the haversack of a person who committed suicide.
He had found the 22-year-old man lying motionless at the foot of an HDB block.
Besides stealing the bag, the older man also threw away a handwritten suicide note and reset the deceased’s mobile phones.
This hampered police investigations as a result.
Channel NewsAsia (CNA) reported that the incident took place at around 1.20pm on 12 Aug 2023.
Ng Hoe Ghee was passing by an HDB block when he noticed a man with multiple injuries lying motionless at the foot of the building.
The address of the location was removed from court documents.
Source: Danist Soh on Unsplash, for illustration purposes only
Ng then used a piece of cardboard to cover the body before taking the younger man’s wallet.
He gave the wallet to the police when they arrived.
Paramedics also came and pronounced the 22-year-old man dead.
According to investigations, the man had visited a relative while carrying a black haversack.
He later jumped from a high level of the building.
After leaving the scene, Ng was curious about which floor the man had jumped from and went up to the 15th storey of the block.
He kept going up the stairs until he came across a black bag, which he hid in a box outside his father’s flat.
Ng returned the next day to go through the contents of the bag.
Besides a laptop, notebooks, and two mobile phones, he found a suicide note by the deceased.
In his note, the man wrote that he was “feeling pain and was struggling with his belief and faith” and that he “felt that he was haunted by something or someone”.
Ng discarded the note and kept the electronics, even paying somebody S$70 to unlock the phones, which were password-protected.
The person he hired unlocked the two phones by doing a factory reset of the devices.
Ng started using one of the phones and would go around with the bag and items he stole with him at all times.
Since the police could not find the deceased’s haversack, they tried contacting Ng for help.
When they could not locate him, they issued a police gazette against him.
On 7 Sep 2023, patrol officers encountered Ng in Jurong East and performed a routine check on him.
It was then that they realised that he had a police gazette issued against him.
They referred Ng to the investigation officer on the 22-year-old man’s case, and he finally returned the items he stole.
However, since the suicide note had been thrown away and the phones had been reset, police lost evidence from these items that could have been used in their investigations into the man’s death.
On Wednesday (7 Feb), Ng received a jail sentence of four months and four weeks.
He had pleaded guilty to a charge of dishonest misappropriation of a deceased person’s property and another charge of dishonest misappropriation of property.
Other charges were also taken into consideration for sentencing.
During his mitigation plea, Ng apologised for his actions and explained that he was struggling financially.
He added that he tossed the note as he believed that the deceased’s struggles were something that should not be released.
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Also read: Man Allegedly Steals E-Bike From Toa Payoh HDB, SCDF Says He’s Not An Officer
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Featured image by MS News.
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