When people land on open water, the result is less grisly, though it still falls far short of lovely. "If you look at these people," says Gary Erickson, the Marin County coroner's investigator whose job is to do just that, "they don't look like there's a whole lot wrong with them." Depending on what position they were in when they hit, very few bones may be broken. Bodies that enter the water feet first or lying flat tend to emerge with the skeleton largely intact. Of the 169 Golden Gate Bridge suicides in Snyder's paper, 17 had no fractures at all, and two had no injuries. If you manage to enter the water feet first and close to vertical, it's possible to survive a leap from the bridge. But it's not very likely: At the time of Snyder's paper, the death rate was 99.3 percent. Ironically, according to another of Snyder's papers, suicides are more likely than accidental plungers to survive extreme impacts -- perhaps because they wish to die and are thus more relaxed when they hit.

Usually what kills you is your ribs. According to Snyder's research, 85 percent of the jumpers had broken ribs. (By comparison, only 15 percent emerged with fractured vertebrae, and only a third with arm or leg fractures.) These jagged pieces of rib "macerate," to use Erickson's verb, the heart, lungs and/or major arteries. Of the bodies in Snyder's paper, 76 percent had punctured lungs, and 57 percent had heart or "great vessel" ruptures.

Dying in this manner is akin to death by gunshot or a stab wound to the heart: It's not always instantaneous, but it's very fast. When a major artery is severed, the brain quickly shuts down for lack of oxygen-bearing blood. "When a vessel the size of the carotid artery has been cut wide open," writes Sherwin Nuland, author of "How We Die," "the entire sequence can take less than a minute." One thing is known: It happens fast enough that few people drown. Only 45 of the 169 suicides in Snyder's paper lived long enough to inhale much water.

Out on the bridge, Lopez and I were joined by Mike Locati, the man who nearly slipped on a brain. Locati's patrol that morning had been uneventful. He was keeping his eye on a lone man with no camera who was staring down at the water. I noticed him too, for he glanced back at Lopez and me after we'd passed. He wore no jacket, just a T-shirt and a pair of Wranglers, which, had he decided to leap, would likely have had the crotch blown out and the rear pockets blown off. ("Even on a sturdy pair of denims," Erickson marveled.)

According to Lopez and Locati, there are two types of jumpers -- and only one they can do much about. There are the suicidal people who aren't quite sure they want to jump and who typically walk the bridge several times or climb over the railing to sit on the 4-foot-wide ledge below it, deliberating. "Ninety-five percent of the time, if we get to these people," said Lopez, "we'll get them back over." The more determined suicides are harder to stop. Some people simply stop their car in traffic, get out and jump, stunning tourists -- who typically compose themselves quickly enough to snap photos or shoot video -- and blocking traffic for hours. (Most suicides park in the parking lot, considerate to the end.) Others appear to be out for a stroll and then suddenly turn in midstride and, as Lopez puts it, "take a flying leap over the railing."

The only way to keep people like these from jumping would be to put up fencing, which the Bridge District thinks would spoil the view. And so, 25 or so times a year (there've been more than 1,000 deaths to date), someone jumps. When it happens, bridge personnel call the Coast Guard and then hurl a buoy over the side from the spot where the person jumped. The buoys have the same density as a human body, so that, in theory, they travel in the current just as a body would. Very often, though, depending on the body fat of the jumper and whether any air bubbles are trapped in his or her clothing, the body will have sunk before the Coast Guard can get to it. In this case, it doesn't float to the surface for about a week and a half, after gases from the bacterial decomposition process have inflated it sufficiently. Talk about spoiling the view.

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