Suicide Incident 8/11/09 Ang Mo Kio

Suicide has became so common nowadays that it seems no longer a foreign occurance to us anymore.

Just a day ago, Mr Ng Chee Kiang was being spotted sitting down and repeatedly lying down on the roof of his Ang Mo Kio Avenue Block 543. Despite numerous attempts to warn and advise him to abstain from foolish acts, the father of two fell to his death.

It was suspected that it was the thirty-nine-year old that brought along with him his two children - Cheryl, three, and Xavier, five. Evidence showed man-made facial and neck injuries on the children who were lying dead in his bedroom. The time he jumped to his death, the house was also in flames.

According to Mdm Tang, a 56-year-old neighbour of Mr Ng, hours before he committed suicide, he was being seen walking to a shop to buy lottery. His wife and maid were out while the tragic events were taking place.

Mr Abdul, a neighbour living directly above their apartment recalled how the couple were having a heated argument last Monday.

Mr Ng's colleagues also said the couples already having problems since a year ago. He claimed that Mr Ng often confided in him about marital problems.

Other neighbours recounted hearing screams coming from their apartment last Sunday.

Loan Sharks had appparently scribbled their notorious signature, O$P$, a warning to debtors to pay up, on the stairway wall right beside his apartment.

Mr Ng's suicide could have been triggered by marital woes over massive gambling debts accumulated over the year. Mr Ng might have pangs of guilts hauting him, as well as hopelessness over a bleak and foreboding future unfolded in front of him. Suicide is easily a quick and convenient way to escape from it all.

With the new IR project that is bound to open to public in just one or two years time, will gambling addiction problems be even worse, leading to more broken families, despair and suicide? By focusing so much on the IR's economic benefits, it seems that the government has to brace itself for another mammoth challenge of curbing gambling addiction.