Chinese authorities probe iPhone worker's death
A Foxconn security official has been suspended and the case involving the apparent suicide of a worker who reportedly lost a prototype iPhone 4G has been handed over to Chinese authorities, according to a Bloomberg report Wednesday.
Foxconn employee Sun Danyong, 25, apparently killed himself on July 16 after realizing that one of the iPhone 4G prototypes that was entrusted to him was missing, according to Chinese media reports. Sun was responsible for shipping iPhone prototypes to Apple.
Sun reported the missing phone to Foxconn, which, according to various Chinese media reports, searched his apartment and questioned him about the disappearance of the device.
Apple told CNET on Tuesday that it was "saddened by the tragic loss of this young employee." The company said it is waiting for the results of "investigations" into Sun's death.
Foxconn did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Foxconn is Apple's longtime manufacturing partner in China. Apple has used the company to manufacture all of its iPods and, more recently, all of the iPhone models.
This is no indication from either company whether the allegedly missing iPhone has been recovered.
Jim Dalrymple has followed Apple and the Mac industry for the last 15 years, first as part of MacCentral and then in various positions at Macworld. Jim also writes about the professional audio market, examining the best ways to record music using a Macintosh. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. He currently runs The Loop. You can follow him on Twitter @jdalrymple. 
It turned out, he had only transposed two numbers.
The moral is: suicide doesn't add up.
This was simply a highly guarded and secret product that was lost for whatever reason and doesn't involve Apple directly. Would the same stink be raised if it was a Harry Potter book or the next generation Nintendo WII console? I seriously doubt it.
My condolences go out the his family. It was not worth losing one's life for it and this has the stink of something bigger going on in the background. This story (unfortunately) will probably be forgotten completely in the next week. I hope the guy didn't die in vain and that justice is given to whatever FoxConn person was behind this.
Capitalism sucks.
Get some perspective! Business is not worth your life. I'd let my company crash to the ground before I lost any sleep about losing something that was fully copyright protected.
There are thousands of things more important than money or work.
The guys supervisors should seriously be investigated if he felt that much pressure on his shoulders.
However this story does seem to favor the idea that somehow apple or a missing phone is totally the cause of his death.
This report is very vague in many areas.
First: There is no evidence of a found suicide letter, note etc stating his reasoning for suicide. Leading many to think it was about apples new phone that went missing. This just gains apple more attention for their company and as many know bad publicity is still good publicity.
Second: There is no reasoning for why the security guard was suspended. And if a major device was lost or suspected stolen wouldn?t they have made a police report anyway?
Third: According to the company there is still an investigation being conducted. Therefore suicide might only be a preliminary speculation. If discovered to be a suicide for all we know he could have left a note stating personal reasons that were the cause. The loss of the phone and his death might very well be unrelated. For all we know he had family issues, marital problems, or even just in the wrong place at the wrong time and killed and made to look like a suicide.
Without knowledge of more facts none of us reading this can even begin to speculate the reasoning for this man?s death and why the phone was missing.
It is the art of any good storyteller to take two events and suggest a method of how they fit together.
- by Glocknine July 23, 2009 1:30 AM PDT
- the chinese guy is not mentally stable or the death is not staged suicide.! a lot of you people dont know anything about us *asians* most of chinese and japanese people specially on corporate companies they work hard and live up for their reputation *super serious on work* sometimes when things goes wrong that they know it will humiliate them and dragging their family name to shame they prefer to escape their problem by ending their lives
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