Vathy Square
The apartment block in Vathy Square from which the mother and son plunged to their death.
A 60-year-old man and his 90-year-old mother jumped off the roof of their apartment block in Vathy Square, near central Athens, early on Thursday in a double suicide that appeared to have been prompted by financial woes.

No suicide note was found but a short despair-filled text was uploaded onto a poem-sharing website late on Wednesday by a man called Antonis Perris. "I don't see any way out. I have property but no cash at all, so what am I going to do about food?" he wrote, adding that his mother had Alzheimer's while he had a terminal illness. "I don't have many days left, I am very sick," he wrote. The note is followed by a string of comments posted afterward by readers wishing him well and then notes of sorrow as of Thursday morning.

Police would not comment on the incident but sources said the man was an unemployed musician.

He and his mother are the latest in a series of Greeks to take their own lives in recent months as the repercussions of the debt crisis push many into despair over their finances.