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He was 11 years old, he lived in Naples, and before jumping out of the window on the 11th floor where he lived, at midnight and a half last Monday, he left a message to his parents. Not a letter, but a text message, sent by cell phone, shortly before, with the help of a bank, dying of a jump. “Mom, Dad, I love you, but I have to follow the man in the black hood. I have no time left. Excuse me. “It is this message that is leading Italian researchers to put an opportunity on the table and search for clues in a viral game: Is the Italian boy the first fatality of Jonathan Galindo, the Goofy Man?
For now, history is written with many doubts and few certainties. According to the local newspaper NapoliToday, the girl, the daughter of two lawyers, lived in Chiaia, a neighborhood on the seafront in Naples. It was the parents themselves who, realizing that their son was not lying down, went to look for them and realized what had happened. The boy, whose identity has not been disclosed, is described by the Italian press, which mentions the family as a happy, loving child, without problems, although in recent days her parents have felt sadder.
The history, cases and alerts of the game “Blue Whale” in nine points
For now, the Naples prosecutors opened an investigation for incitement to suicide. Jonathan Galindo is the main suspect of the authorities.
It turns out that Goofy Man is not a real person, just like the Momo doll or the Blue Whale were not. Or, at least, it’s not just one person. In social networks, whether on Facebook, Instagram or Tik Tok, the name and the image are repeated as well. But dozens of profiles use the face of a masked man, reminiscent of Disney’s Goofy as an avatar.
Little is known about Jonathan Galindo. It is speculated that the modus operandi be similar to the Blue Whale -a game for teenagers, which appeared in Russia in 2016, with 50 challenges in which the last one is suicide- or the Momo doll, a fictional character who talks to children on WhatsApp, sending messages violence that can incite suicide.
After the “Blue Whale”, the sinister challenge “Momo” arrived this year in Portugal
In this story it is also important to separate the waters: the image is one thing, the name another. The image used in all of these profiles was created by Samuel Canini AKA Dusky Sam, a cosplayer and mask maker.
In 2019, it was a Tik Tok user who was the first to associate the image created by Canini with the name Jonathan Galindo. The geographic origin is estimated to be Mexico and from there, the character traveled online to the United States, India, Vietnam, Spain, Italy and Brazil, writes Corriere della Sera. Similar profiles multiplied in such a way that the creator of the mask felt the need to separate from the subject.
“Hello everyone. This Jonathan Galindo craze seems to terrify many impressionable young people. The photos and videos are my own from 2012-2013. They were for my own weird amusement and not for a modern adventurer to scare and intimidate people,” he wrote on Twitter last July.
Hi everyone. This Jonathan Galindo madness seems to terrify a great number of impressionable young people. Photos and videos are mine from 2012-2013. So they were for my own weird amusement, not for a modern thrill seeker looking to scare and intimidate people.
– Dark Sam (@DuskySamCat) July 3, 2020
After the death of the young Italian, the authorities confiscated his mobile phone and the console on which he played – and that he had an internet connection – to try to reconstruct the last conversations he had with other people on the internet.
In addition, the Italian police will hear the testimony of some of the boy’s friends.
In Brazil, the police issued a series of alerts to the parents of children and adolescents, asking them to report accounts associated with the image of the Goofy Man on suspicion of incitement to suicide. “This profile challenges the interested party to send a private message and, in response, begins to send videos, texts, audios and even make video calls. These messages cause discomfort, fear, terror and can even induce suicide, “explained Fernanda Lima, from the Civil Police, at that time, in a video on her Instagram account.
After the “Blue Whale”, “Momo”, the new online phenomenon in the sights of the authorities
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