Suicides at the Golden Gate Bridge
Between 1937 and 2012, an estimated 1,400 bodies were recovered of people who had jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge, located in the San Francisco Bay Area in the United States.
[4] People who have survived the jump have had severe consequences including paralysis, organ damage, broken bones and lifelong pain.
[5] A number of measures are in place to discourage people from jumping, including telephone hotlines and patrols by emergency personnel and bridge workers.
[10] Consequently, Marin County coroner Ken Holmes asked local media to stop reporting the total number of jumpers.
[13] By 2012 the unofficial count exceeded 1,600 (in which the body was recovered or someone saw the jump)[1] and new suicides were occurring about once every two weeks, according to a San Francisco Chronicle analysis.
People have been known to travel to San Francisco specifically to jump off the bridge, and may take a bus or taxicab to the site;[19] policemen sometimes find abandoned rental cars in the parking lot.
[21] Engineering professor Natalie Jeremijenko, as part of her "Bureau of Inverse Technology" art collective, created a "Despondency Index" by correlating the Dow Jones Industrial Average with the number of jumpers detected by "Suicide Boxes" containing motion-detecting cameras, which she claimed to have set up under the bridge.
Before embarking on their morning or afternoon shifts, Bridgewatch Angels volunteers receive training on the warning signs of someone in crisis, indirect and direct ways to engage with people walking alone on the bridge, and safety protocol when interacting with a suicidal person requiring police intervention.
Called "Cowboys of the Sky", they have the equipment and knowledge of the bridge, as well as the experience working at extreme heights, giving them the qualifications to go over the rail and assist those in need.
On January 14, 2005, the San Francisco Chronicle published an open letter by writer–director Jenni Olson calling for a suicide barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge.
In the fall of 2005 the San Francisco Chronicle published a seven-part series of articles, titled "Lethal Beauty", focusing on the problem of suicide and the Golden Gate Bridge and emphasizing that a solution was not just possible, but even desirable.
[7] California Highway patrolman Kevin Briggs is credited with saving hundreds of lives of would-be jumpers by talking to them before they can take the plunge.
[39][40][41] On July 28, 2010, the board received $5 million from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) towards conducting a final design study of the barrier.
[45] In March 2014, The New York Times reported that it was expected that the directors of the Bridge District would vote to change its policy and allow the use of toll money to supplement governmental funds for a suicide barrier.
[46][47] The design was finalized in December 2014; however the project was delayed due to concerns from the National Park Service about storing construction materials at the site for the estimated three years it will take to complete the work.
District officials attributed the delay to the original lead contractor, Shimmick Construction, having underbid the project, and to its 2017 acquisition by AECOM.
According to Denis Mulligan, general manager of the district "The net is designed not for a cushy landing but rather to inflict a painful, though nonlethal, injury on a jumper.
Neylor grabbed the man's belt, but Wobber was able to get free and jumped over the four-foot-high rail to his death in the San Francisco Bay.
With the child standing on a girder just outside the bridge's railing, her father, 37-year-old elevator installation foreman August DeMont, commanded her to jump.
[76] On August 26, 1993, Roy Raymond, the founder of Victoria's Secret, died after intentionally jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge at the age of 46.
[77] Originally surviving a fall from the Golden Gate in 1988, Paul Aladdin Alarab died on March 19, 2003, when he jumped from the bridge in protest of the United States' invasion of Iraq.
Alarab, whose father was born in Iraq, was a 44-year-old real estate agent from Kensington, California, who climbed over a railing on the East (Bay) side of the bridge, mid-span.
Law enforcement tried to talk him back over the railing while he read a statement he had written denouncing the war, which had started earlier that day.
In the 1988 incident, he lost his grip on the rope and fell into San Francisco Bay, surviving with three broken ribs and both lungs collapsed.
Retired UCSF professor of psychiatry Jerome Motto stated that Alarab might have been disturbed by the outbreak of the war and "that previously bearable pain suddenly became intolerable.
Found living in a low-rent rooming house and having lost 40 pounds (18 kg), Christensen explained that campaign contributors who supported his election had asked him to "do things he couldn't do."
[86][87] The California Highway Patrol recommended the San Francisco District Attorney's Office charge the student with misdemeanor trespassing (a charge that entails climbing any rail, cable, suspender rope, tower or superstructure not intended for public use), punishable by up to a year in the county jail and/or a fine up to $10,000, and that the teenager undergo a medical/psychiatric evaluation by medical professionals.
The film captured a number of suicides, and featured interviews with family and friends of some of the identified people who had thrown themselves from the bridge that year.
The Joy of Life, released in 2005, is an American documentary film that recounts the chronological history of suicide at the Golden Gate Bridge.
The film discusses key design changes made to the bridge by architect Irving Morrow, notably the lowering of the pedestrian railing.
