Multiple reports Tuesday indicate a 25 year-old employee of Foxconn, one of Apple’s OEM suppliers in China, killed himself last week after losing a 4th generation iPhone which he had been instructed to ship to Apple headquarters in Cupertino, CA.
Sun Danyong was a recent engineering graduate who worked in product communications for electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn in Shenzhen, a city in the booming industrial corridor between Guangzhou and Hong Kong.
On Thursday, July 9th, according to the first English-language report on the incident at Venture Beat, Sun got 16 prototype phones from the assembly line at a local Foxconn factory. At some point in the next few days, he discovered one of the phones was missing.
On Monday, July 13, he reported the missing phone to his boss. Then, that Wednesday, three Foxconn employees illegally searched his apartment. Accusations have reportedly been flying about the Chinese language Twittersphere that Sun was detained and physically abused during the investigation, although this has not been substantiated.
Shortly after 3am on Thursday July 16th, security cameras at Sun’s apartment building show him leaping to his death from a window in his apartment.
