As the charcoal burns, the concentration of carbon monoxide, produced by the incomplete combustion of carbon, gradually increases. CO concentrations of as little as one part per thousand can be fatal if inhaled over a period of two hours.
History
As a method of suicide it is mentioned by Eugène Sue in The Wandering Jew. In July 1994, two students of Taipei First Girls' High Schoolended their lives by charcoal-burning in a hotel in Su'ao, Yilan with a note that did not state the reason clearly, even though that it was suspected in some mass media that they were a lesbian couple. In November 1998, a middle-aged woman in Hong Kong took her own life using this method inside her small, sealed bedroom. She had a chemical engineering background. Hong Kong was suffering from an economic depression at the time, and suicide in general was increasing. After the details of this suicide were highly publicised by local mass media, many others killed themselves in this way. Within two months, charcoal-burning had become the third major suicide killer in Hong Kong. Charcoal-burning suicide accounted for 1.7% of Hong Kong suicides in 1998 and 10.1% in 1999. By 2001, it had surpassed hanging as the second most-common method of suicide in Hong Kong, accounting for about 25% of all suicide deaths. The method has since spread to mainland China, Taiwan and Japan. Beginning in 2003, authorities in Japan have seen a series of group suicides, committed by strangers who met in suicide chat rooms online. Such a group will typically use sleeping pills and charcoal stoves in a van parked in a remote area. On 26 July 2006, 16-year-old Brazilian musician Vinícius Gageiro Marques, known by his alias Yoñlu, locked himself in his bathroom with two barbecue grills, and posted on a forum asking for help killing himself. While some people in the thread pleaded him to stop, others gave him the advice he wanted. A Canadian online friend of Marques's learned of the suicide attempt and called the Brazilian authorities. Although the police and paramedics were able to enter the apartment and clear the smoke, Marques was pronounced dead after multiple attempts at resuscitation. On 9 March 2007, Brad Delp, the lead singer of the Americanrock bandBoston, killed himself using this method. On 18 December 2017, Kim Jong-hyun, a member of the South Korean idol group SHINee, was found unconscious in a Gangnam residential hotel. He was later pronounced dead in the ICU. The police ultimately ruled his death a suicide through the earlier text messages sent to his sister, after the discovery of charcoal briquette remnants in a frying pan at the scene. On October 16, 2018, an ex-member of GNZ48, Du Yuwei ended her life at the age of 19 using this method.
