Video: Police Pull Suicidal Man From Verrazano Bridge’s Outer Cables In Heroic Rescue
Just as a suicidal man was about to take a public, final plunge from the beams of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, NYPD Emergency Service Unit officers saw an opening and made their move.
Jobless and worried about providing for his 2-year-old son, the 39-year-old man had stopped his Dodge Caravan on the Brooklyn-bound upper level and climbed to the cables shortly after 10:00 a.m. When officers arrived, they spent an hour trying to talk him down before the man began praying.
SILive reports:
“We thought we were making headway with him. We almost thought he was going to come in. Then he started to shut down slightly on us. He started, we think, he was praying. It appeared he was making peace with what he was about to do,” said Det. Jeffrey Loughery. “At that point we were able to — we saw a little window of opportunity, and we made the grab at that time.”
… Loughery and two other members of Staten Island’s ESU Truck 5, Det. Paul Fazio and Officer Robert Reed, who were attached to the bridge with safety cables, managed to pull the man off the bridge’s metal “finger,” and though he struggled initially, once he was in custody, he calmed down.
According to police, the man — a Merrick, L.I. resident whose identity has not been released by the NYPD — pulled over to the far right lane in a Dodge Caravan and got out.
He left his wallet behind, and put his keys atop a handwritten suicide note, penned in black ink in an unspecified foreign language on a standard loose-leaf-sized piece of paper, police said.
According to the report, the man admitted to having suffered from mental illness for much of his life. Once he was pulled to safety – a feat achieved when the three officers hooked a harness to him, as seen in the video above – the man began asking the officers if they were safe.
“Okay, okay, I just want to make sure you guys are safe,” Fazio recalled the man saying, according to SILive.
There have been at least eight suicides from the bridge and seven suicide attempts since December 2011. Some have called for additional security provisions to prevent attempts. As of now, the only measures on the bridge are police patrols, signs that read “Life is worth living,” and phones that link directly to a suicide hotline.
You can read more about recent suicides and attempts from the Verrazano-Narrows bridge here.
