Chinese woman accidentally gets neck trapped in sidewalk fence and suffocates to death
A pregnant woman in northern China suffocated to death on a busy sidewalk after her head somehow slipped into a street fence and got stuck.
The freak accident, which happened in the northern Shaanxi province earlier this week, has shocked many in the country who are used to seeing the common white-painted metal guard rails along city streets.
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An eyewitness told The Paper that the woman had knelt by the road to rest, but accidentally got stuck in the railing. Passers-by tried to pry the rails apart to free her, but failed to, and she died before the ambulance arrived.
She was reportedly eight months pregnant with twins, and has an 11-year-old daughter.
Photos and videos of the woman kneeling with her neck trapped between the fencing, and people trying in vain to save her have been circulating on Weibo.
Chinese netizens are also debating the safety of the railings, because this is the third time that a person has died after getting caught in one of them.
In 2010, an elderly lady was found outside a supermarket in Jiangsu motionless, kneeling by a similar fencing with her neck stuck in it. And in 2013, a woman in Beijing was also trapped by the neck in the white street railing, and died later in the hospital.
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Victoria Ho is Mashable's Asia Editor, based in Singapore. She previously reported on news and tech at The Business Times, TechCrunch and ZDNet. When she isn't writing, she's making music with her band
