A 64-year-old US woman is reportedly the first person to use the suicide chamber in Switzerland.
According to the capsule’s creator, Philip Nietzsche who has been nicknamed “Dr Death”, the woman entered the chamber and “almost immediately pressed the button” to end her life.
..an idyllic peaceful death in a Swiss forest where The Last Resort @tlrswiss used the Sarco device to help a US woman have the death she wanted..Lees dit artikel op de Volkskrant https://t.co/6DbKfmzYnC
– Philip Nitschke (@philipnitschke) September 24, 2024
He had previously described that anyone who enters the chamber and presses the button releases nitrogen gas which causes hypoxia and eventually death. It takes a total of ten minutes to complete the gruesome process with the final phrase heard being “If you want to die, press this button.”
The chamber was set in a wooded area in northern Switzerland so the American woman could see the trees and the sky in her final moments.
“Everything happened as we expected. I believe she lost consciousness two minutes after the procedure started and finally died after five minutes,” Nietzsche told Dutch media. Describing what happened, he added that “we saw small contractions and muscle movements in her arms but she was probably already unconscious.”
The US woman, who was reportedly a mother of two, appears to have suffered from a very serious illness with severe pain and “had wanted to die for at least two years.”
Officers who rushed to the area when they were informed of the use of the suicide chamber found the woman’s lifeless body and arrested, among others, the manager of the Last Resort company that operates Sarco, two lawyers, and a newspaper photographer.
The prosecutor in the canton of Schaffhausen said the creators of Sarco had been warned in writing not to use the chamber.
According to Dutch newspaper de Volksrant, the woman had given Last Resort the green light on video to go ahead with the procedure, saying she wanted to end her life.
According to the same source in the 4-minute video, the woman reportedly said she had wanted to die for two years after being diagnosed with a serious illness. In the same video, the woman reportedly said her two sons were “100% with me” on the assisted suicide.
“An idyllic peaceful death in a Swiss forest where Last Resort used the Sarco device to help a US woman have the death she wanted,” Nietzsche wrote in his X post.
