Several people have been detained by police in Switzerland after the “Sarco” suicide pod was used to kill a 64-year-old American woman. Dutch newspaper Volksrant reported on the woman’s death, complete with pictures of the suicide as it happened.
The woman’s name was not given, nor was the reason for her suicide; a statement given by the Last Resort, a Swiss affiliate of Exit International, which created the Sarco device, said simply that she “had been suffering for many years from a number of serious problems associated with severe immune compromise.”
Florian Willet, co-president of The Last Resort, was present for the woman’s death, along with the Volksrant photographer. Both have been detained by Swiss police. An investigation has since been opened, and criminal charges could be forthcoming.
The woman’s death took place in Schaffhausen, which is near the border of Germany, in the woods near a forest cabin in Merishausen. While assisted suicide is legal in Switzerland, including to foreigners, there can be no “external assistance,” and anyone who helps the person to end his or her own life cannot do so due to “any self-serving motive.”
The co-president of the company which makes Sarco could certainly be argued to have a self-serving motive – one of profit – and according to the Associated Press, a state prosecutor in Schaffhausen warned Exit International this summer that operation of Sarco could lead to criminal charges, with up to five years in prison.
Swiss politicians are already responding to the death, questioning whether it violates current assisted suicide law.
“On one hand, it does not fulfill the demands of the product safety law, and as such, must not be brought into circulation,” Health Minister Elisabeth Baume-Schneider said Monday in Parliament. “On the other hand, the corresponding use of nitrogen is not compatible with the article on purpose in the chemicals law.”
Philip Nitschke, who invented Sarco and is nicknamed “Dr. Death,” said the device operated as intended. “When she entered the Sarco, she almost immediately pressed the button. She didn’t say anything. She really wanted to die,” he told Volksrant. “My estimate is that she lost consciousness within two minutes and that she died after five minutes. We saw jerky, small twitches of the muscles in her arms, but she was probably already unconscious by then. It looked exactly how we expected it to look.”
Nitschke announced the creation of his suicide pod in 2018. He named it “Sarco,” short for sarcophagus, and initially said he wanted to put the plans online so anyone could create the device themselves with a 3D printer. The person is killed when the compartment they are in is flooded with nitrogen, specifically called nitrogen hypoxia. The manner of death, despite how benignly Nitschke describes it, is asphyxiation, meaning the person suffocates to death.
