Tragedy: medical student falls to his death

We’ve recently blogged about death of a young houseman (still unclear if it was suicide or accidental overdose) but now tragically a young medical student’s life has suddenly ended as the Star reports

GEORGE TOWN: A medical student fell to his death from a multi-storey car park of a shopping mall here. Steven Ko Yiu Hing, 24, (pic) is believed to have fallen from the fourth floor of the car park. His BMW was parked on that floor. Ko’s father, founder of a chain of skin specialist clinics, declined to speak to reporters at the Penang Hospital mortuary where his son’s body was sent for post-mortem. OCPD Asst Comm Gan Kong Meng said the father had told police that his son was under pressure since beginning his studies at the Penang Medical College here a few months ago.
He said Ko’s body was found sprawled on the ground floor by three workers at about 2am yesterday.
“Ko’s parking ticket showed that he had parked his car at the mall at about 4pm on Wednesday,” ACP Gan said, adding that police had not ruled out foul play.
The case has been temporarily classified as sudden death. College president Brendon Lyons said he was saddened by the incident.
“Ko was an active person in college and had done volunteer work at an education fair,” he said. Lyons said Ko had continued his studies at the college after completing about two years of his course in Ireland.

Our thoughts and prayers go out to his family in their time of sorrow. I do not recall any other instances of alleged suicide involving medical students in this country so this might be the first. Suicide might be preventable if you could spot early symptoms in friends and colleagues. Do you know what questions to ask? Here’s a video from an old post of ours on How to Ask Someone if He or She Is Suicidal