A student of the Federal Polytechnic, Ilaro in Ogun State, Samuel Adegoke, has committed suicide after he lost his school fees to gambling in the school.
Adegoke, a National Diploma II student of Electrical Electronic Engineering, reportedly took a substance suspected to be a sniper when his colleagues were preparing for the first-semester examination on Monday.
The deceased’s colleagues told journalists that he lost his school fees and that of his friend on online betting on Friday.
The school management had warned that no student would be allowed to write an examination without completing the registration.
The institution’s Public Relations Officer, Sola Abiala, who confirmed the incident to journalists on Wednesday, said Adegoke took the substance a few minutes before the commencement of the examination on Monday.
He said: “The student was rushed to the school clinic from where he was referred to a specialist hospital outside the school in Ilaro before he was pronounced dead.
“It was detected at the specialist hospital that the late student drank sniper.
“His father told the school that his son used his school fees to gamble last session but he rescued him by making another payment.
“We have a policy here that any student that does not pay school fees will not write the examination. The boy realised that he would not write the exam and that was why he committed suicide.
“We sent for his parents and briefed them. His father told us that his late son did the same thing last session and he had to send money to him to pay the fees. The man said if he was aware of the latest one, he would have paid the money.
“When we asked the father to take the corpse, he rejected it and said he could not take his son’s corpse back home.
“He asked us to bury him. The school paid part of the burial expenses and had to pay the fee for the other student whose fee was used to gamble to avoid another calamity. We didn’t want him to also commit suicide.
“We were surprised that he did not leave any suicide note behind. We did not see any notes. We went to his house but found nothing other than the bottle of the sniper he drank.”
