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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Exactly what happens when a person leaps off the Golden Gate Bridge? Reading this article is the safest way to find out.
Feb 9, 2001 | In 1996, I jumped off a 350-foot-high bridge over a river gorge. I wanted to experience what it would be like to leap, head first, from a lethal height and hurtle toward my death. The death part itself I had no interest in experiencing -- in fact, a fairly strong interest in not experiencing -- so I had a bungee cord wrapped around my ankles. After the initial terror and involuntary-scream portion of the event, the fall was quite enjoyable. I didn't flail or rotate helplessly like people pushed from balconies on TV, but dropped smoothly in dive formation. I felt the way, as a child, I imagined Superman feeling. It led me to believe that jumping off San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge would be a lovely way to go.
I don't feel that way anymore. This I blame on several people, including Gary Erickson, an investigator at the Marin County, Calif., coroner's office, where bodies pulled from the water below the Golden Gate Bridge are taken; Richard Snyder, author of a research paper titled "Fatal Injuries Resulting From Extreme Water Impact"; and Herb Lopez, a Golden Gate Bridge safety patrol sergeant.
In fact, the pointed lack of loveliness involved in a bridge suicide is one of the things Sgt. Lopez uses to dissuade the suicidal individuals he encounters in his job. In response to pressure from San Francisco Suicide Prevention, the Golden Gate Bridge District has safety officers regularly (depending on their workload) patrolling the bridge on scooters and bikes, scanning crowds for possible jumpers. (Unlike tourists, jumpers are usually alone, do not carry cameras and do not look like happy people on vacation.)
Lopez regales would-be suicides with details of has-been suicides he has helped recover. (While the U.S. Coast Guard retrieves bodies that land in open water, bridge personnel are responsible for jumpers who land on the ground or in the concrete-ringed moat that surrounds the bridge's South Tower.) I asked Lopez for a "for instance." He thought for a moment -- I cannot begin to imagine the horrors that flashed through his mind in that moment -- and then he said: "One time Lt. Locati was down on the moat bringing in a body and someone yells, 'Look out, Mike!' He looks down, and right there on the concrete in front of him is a complete human brain. Something sheared off the back of the guy's head."
We were on the South Tower at the time, so Lopez leaned over the railing and pointed out the spot where the brain had sat. A tourist stopped alongside us. "What are we looking at?" he said.
"Pelicans," said Lopez.
The most recent suicidal individual got to hear about a terminally ill man who landed between two boulders near the shore on the Marin County side of the bridge. "All we could see of him," said Lopez, "was his legs sticking up." He made a peace sign to illustrate the man's legs protruding from between the rocks. "When we put him in the basket to haul him up, he was about this long." Lopez held his hands about a yard apart, as though relating a fishing story, which, in a way, I guess he was.
The basket to which Lopez was referring was a crab basket. In its present incarnation, it, and a grappling hook, are the primary tools used by bridge personnel to haul bodies from the moat. This is not to say that the crab basket does not occasionally still haul crabs. "A lot of times, we pull bodies out with crabs hanging off them," said Lopez. Crabs apparently consider people as much of a delicacy as people consider crabs. "They go for the eyeballs first, then the soft flesh on the cheeks." Lopez possesses the matter-of-factness and healthy remove of people who deal with death as part of their job. He didn't strike me as callous or uncaring, just inured.
