A 19-year-old student has tragically fallen to her death from a tenth floor hostel balcony while trying to take a ‘selfie’.
Viktoria Grinkevich was taking the photo over the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius on Sunday night.
Friends said she stepped on a stool then climbed onto the handrail on the balcony of the student hostel where she was staying.
Viktoria, who is a citizen of Belarus, lost her balance and fell some 90 feet, friends told police.
She had wanted to take a selfies against the background of the night sky over the city, they said.
An ambulance arrived quickly at the scene and paramedics tried for more than an hour to save her, but failed.
Viktoria was a second year student majoring in media and communications studies at the European Humanitarian University in Vilnius.
A statement by the university said: “Students, teachers and all member of the community are shocked with this tragedy.
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“We send our sincere condolences to the family and friends of Viktoria.
“Vilnius police is investigating the circumstances of the tragedy.”
The Belarus Foreign Ministry confirmed her tragic death.
Spokesman Anatoly Glaz said: “The Belarus embassy is in touch with the law enforcement agencies of Lithuania.”
RECENT DEATHS BY SELFIE
The death comes days after Brussels-based couple Jean and Camille were slammed for glamorising dangerous selfies in recent social media posts.
Adrenalin-pinching pictures show the couple teetering on the edge of a moving train, with just a handrail stopping them from plunging hundreds of metres into a forest below.
Last year, a travel blogger who plunged to her death with her husband while apparently taking a selfie had warned people against the stunt just weeks before.
The bodies of Vishnu Viswanath, 29, and Meenakshi Moorthy, 30, were found by park rangers at Yosemite National Park, California, on Thursday after they fell 800feet.
In June of 2018, a 33-year-old woman fell 500 feet at a popular beauty spot.
Sarita Rammahesh Chouhan slipped and fell while visiting Matheran, a hill station in the Raigad district of western India’s Maharashtra state.
A mum -of-two was also killed just moments after taking a smiling selfie on her bike in October 2016 in London.
Carmen Greenway, 41, was cycling home after having dinner at a pub to celebrate her mother’s birthday when she hit a bumpy patch of road and lost control.
She fractured her skull and died six days later in St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, central London, after suffering a cardiac arrest.
And earlier this year, a British tourist and her Australian boyfriend fell 100ft to their deaths taking a selfie while overlooking a beach in Portugal.
In May of 2018, three members of the same family drowned while trying to take a selfie in a deep pond.
The men, all non-swimmers, set up a camera on the water’s edge to pose for a photo together but began struggling to stay afloat in Gauridham Kund, India.
PART OF A DANGEROUS NEW TREND
The dangerous selfie trend sees hundreds of couples risk their lives for the perfect photo.
A world-first study into “selfie deaths” involved academics from three universities who set out to understand why people end up dying whilst taking pictures of themselves.
The study found that between 2011 and 2017, 259 people have been accidentally killed in all kinds of different ways while taking selfies all over the world.
The researchers wrote: “The desire of getting more of this social currency prompts youth to extreme lengths.”
The study claimed the first “killfie” took place in 2014, with the death toll quickly accelerating.
People who snap images of themselves are often driven by a need for approval on social media, the team said, which is represented by the “the number of likes, comments and shares” each pic receives.
The most common way in which people die while taking selfies is by drowning, being hit by traffic or falling.
The country where most of the deaths occurred was India which accounted for around half of all the selfie-related deaths, closely followed by Russia, the USA and Pakistan.
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