TRAGIC: This Mother and Son were so Poor They Hanged Themselves with the Same Rope

A very, very poor woman and her son fed up of scraping a living decided to kill themselves - but they were so poor they hung themselves with the same rope.

The shocking story happened in the village of Jasenica in western Bosnia where 83-year-old Dusanka Lukac lived with her 55-year-old son Brane Lukac in abject poverty.


Neighbours said they knew that the mother and son were struggling but the situation was also the
same for many others in the region and there was little opportunity for anybody to help them. Nevertheless they were shocked when the couple had hung themselves using the same rope.

MirrorOnline reports that neighbour Mirjana Ivanec, 46, said:

    "They did not have any more money for fuel for heating and I know they struggled to find enough money for food, despite the fact that some people round here did help them out. They would get some food but it seems they just felt they couldn't go on with this sort of an existence."

She said the older woman in particular had been suffering from ill health from a cold that would not go away and her son had been doing his best to look after her. They had not been seen for a few days when worried neighbours broke down the front door of the mud walled hut where they lived, and found the bodies hanging from the same rope inside.

Neighbour Milan Vejinovic, 39, had wanted to bring the couple some cakes and had not managed to get a reply, and so raised the alarm.

Ivanec, continued:

    "They were forced out of their home during the wars in the 1990s and had lost everything when they returned. The dead woman's husband had died 10-years-ago and she and her son never really recovered from that, they clearly missed him but also it left them really poverty stricken. She had a daughter, but she had married and moved out and didn't have a lot of time to visit them she lived a long way away in Belgrade."

The village is in what used to be a Serbian enclave before the war but most fled during the bitter fighting that saw the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. After the war, only some of the older people including Dusanka and her son returned to the region where they lived in impoverished conditions.

There was no work to be had in the area and little in the way of social benefits.

Police spokesman Ale Siljdedic said: "We have checked the case and it is a double suicide".

He added that there were no signs of violence on either of the bodies.