SAN FRANCISCO – The body of Yohanes Kidane was found floating in the San Francisco Bay last week. The newly hired software engineer at Netflix recently moved to the Bay area to begin work with the streaming giant. His death was ruled a suicide.
Kidane, 22, was last seen Aug. 14 leaving his San Jose apartment in an Uber just weeks after moving cross country for the job position at Netflix, the New York Post reported. The young man hailed from Webster, New York.
A passing boater saw a body floating in the waters northeast of the Golden Gate Bridge last Tuesday. The person flagged down the Coast Guard and the badly decomposed remains were recovered, according to the Marin County Sheriff’s Office.
Kidane was a recent graduate at Cornell University. His wallet, cellphone and backpack had been found near the Golden Gate Bridge Welcome Center not long after he went missing. Photo data showed that he was at the bridge for a majority of the night before disappearing.
Yohanes Kidane graduated from Cornell University in May. (Photo courtesy Yosief Kidane)
The recovered body showed signs of “advanced decomposition, prolonged exposure to the aquatic environment and appreciable depredation,” according to the sheriff’s office.
The coroner positively identified the remains as that of Kidane on Thursday and promptly notified the man’s family, the Post reported.
The coroner then determined his cause of death was a combination of blunt impact injuries and drowning and that the manner of death was suicide, the sheriff said.
Kidane was only in his second week at Netflix when he vanished.
The iconic Golden Gate Bridge is known for its beauty … and suicides. Between 1937 and 2012, an estimated 1,400 bodies were recovered of people who had jumped from the landmark, reported the Los Angeles Times in 2012.
Fortunately, a new suicide prevention barrier on the bridge is reportedly having a significant effect — even though it was not yet completed, CBS News reported in August 2023.
“According to statistics released in July by the Bridge Rail Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group that has campaigned for a barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge since 2006, there have been five confirmed suicide jumps from the bridge this year through June, compared with 22 from all of last year,” CBS reported.
“Between 2000 and 2019, the bridge averaged between 30 and 40 suicides per year.”
