3 British-Nigerian Sisters Committed Suicide 16 Years After Mother Drowned

The father of three British-Nigerian sisters who drowned off Brighton beach in the United Kingdom has expressed profound heartbreak over the loss of his daughters, describing their deaths as an unbearable pain.

“There are no words that can adequately express the pain of losing a child. To lose all three of my precious daughters is heartbreaking,” Joseph Jacobsen said in an emotional statement read on his behalf during an inquest on Thursday.

A UK coroner, Penelope Schofield, had ruled that the sisters, Jane Adetoro, 36; Christina Walters, 32; and Rebecca Walters, 31, took their own lives after entering the sea at Brighton beach on May 13.

According to the BBC, Schofield, the senior coroner for West Sussex, Brighto and Hove, told the inquest that the sisters encountered adverse sea conditions after entering the water and were unable to swim.

Jacobsen, who followed the proceedings through a video link at Woodvale Coroner’s Court in Brighton, said he had watched his daughters grow from little girls into beautiful and intelligent women.

During the hearing, the coroner said the sisters had lived secluded and private lives, making it difficult to establish why they went to the beach and entered the water.

“These three sisters lived very secluded lives; they were incredibly private. We don’t know why they took this course of action or indeed why they chose to do it in Brighton. It is not for the court to speculate and sadly these reasons may never be known,” Schofield said.

The sisters had lived together in Greenford, London, before their deaths.

On May 11, two days before they drowned, they visited an area in Birmingham close to where their mother had drowned in 2010.

They subsequently left their London residence and travelled together by taxi to Brighton, arriving at 10:21pm British Summer Time on May 12.

They were last seen alive at 2:42am on May 13.

The circumstances surrounding their deaths have drawn attention to the family’s history of loss, with the sisters’ mother having died by drowning 16 years earlier.

In a GoFundMe appeal launched for the sisters in June, their uncle, Adesoji Adetoro, also expressed the family’s grief over the tragedy.

“The girls had so much life ahead of them, and their loss has left a pain and emptiness in our hearts that words cannot describe,” he said.