Jumpers - The New Yorker. Midway along the walkway, which carries pedestrians and cyclists between San Francisco and Marin County, he stopped and climbed the four- foot safety railing. Then he lowered himself carefully onto the bridge.
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On a sunny day, as this day was, the view is glorious: Angel Island to the left, Alcatraz straight ahead, Treasure Island farther off, bisecting the long gray tangent of the Bay Bridge, and, layered across the hills to the south, San Francisco. Alarab turned and looped a thick rope over the railing, then wound it around his right wrist five times and grabbed it with his gloved right hand.
His weekday attire usually consisted of a business suit with a . Through the palings of the bridge rail and the rush of traffic, he could see the mouth of the Bay to the west and the Pacific beyond.
Clasping a typed statement to his chest with his left hand, he leaned backward, away from the railing, and waited for help to arrive. Alarab, a forty- four- year- old Iraqi- American, was a large, balding, friendly man who kept a . Alarab had chosen this day, the first of America. Alarab told them that he wanted to speak to the media. As it happened, a number of TV crews were at the south end of the bridge, filming standups about heightened terrorism precautions.
A Telemundo crew came out, and Alarab began to read a declaration about Iraq. One Highway Patrol officer said, . His weight proved too much for the apparatus, and the can broke free with him inside. Ken Baldwin and Kevin Hines both say they hurdled over the railing, afraid that if they stood on the chord they might lose their courage. Baldwin was twenty- eight and severely depressed on the August day in 1. He counted to ten again, then vaulted over. As he crossed the chord in flight, Baldwin recalls, .
After treating himself to a last meal of Starbursts and Skittles, he paced back and forth and sobbed on the bridge walkway for half an hour. No one asked him what was wrong. A beautiful German tourist approached, handed him her camera, and asked him to take her picture, which he did. The only hint of his fascination was his business card, which he resisted changing despite his boss. The card featured a photo of Alarab on the shore of the Bay; behind him lurked the Golden Gate. On that March morning, facing the camera, Alarab read an ambiguous handwritten addendum to his statement: .
If you are antiwar, e- mail me at alarabpaul@hotmail. He bent to put his statement on the bridge, then placed his cell phone on it. He then unwound his wrist from the securing rope and stepped off the chord.
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The officers on the walkway craned their necks in a horrified line, watching him fall. At a 1. 97. 7 rally on the Golden Gate supporting the building of an anti- suicide barrier above the railing, a minister, speaking to six hundred of his followers, tried to explain the bridge. Matchless in its Art Deco splendor, the Golden Gate is also unrivalled as a symbol: it is a threshold that presides over the end of the continent and a gangway to the void beyond.
Just being there, the minister said, his words growing increasingly incoherent, left him in a rather suicidal mood. The Golden Gate, he said, is . Nine hundred and twelve of them did. Every two weeks, on average, someone jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge. In the eighties, workers at a local lumberyard formed . At least twelve hundred people have been seen jumping or have been found in the water since the bridge opened, in 1. Roy Raymond, the founder of Victoria.
The actual toll is probably considerably higher, swelled by legions of the stealthy, who sneak onto the bridge after the walkway closes at sundown and are carried to sea with the neap tide. Many jumpers wrap suicide notes in plastic and tuck them into their pockets. Like Paul Alarab, who lived and worked in the East Bay, several people have crossed the Bay Bridge to jump from the Golden Gate; there is no record of anyone traversing the Golden Gate to leap from its unlovely sister bridge. Richard Seiden, a professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley. Jerome Motto, a local psychiatrist and suicide expert, says. Yet the locals take a peculiar pride in the bridge.
In the United States today, someone takes his own life every eighteen minutes, and suicide is much more common than homicide. Still, the issue is rarely examined. In the Bay Area, the topic is virtually taboo.
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One Golden Gate official told me repeatedly, . He walked up and down the bridge wearing a sandwich board that said . Support a Suicide Barrier. The impact had ripped off his left glove and his right shoe.
The Coast Guard crew, wearing their standard jumper- retrieval garb to protect against leaking body fluids. Half an hour later, Alarab was pronounced dead. Gary Tindel, the assistant coroner of Marin County, who examined the body on the dock at Fort Baker, at the north end of the bridge, observed that . Soon afterward, the cell phone rang.
When she did, he told her that her ex- husband had jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. Then he told her that the corpse wore a yarn necklace. And she recalled, suddenly, that their daughter had made such a necklace for Paul.
Jumpers tend to idealize what will happen after they step off the bridge. Lanny Berman, the executive director of the American Association of Suicidology, says. They think that life will slow down in those final seconds, and then they.
On her way down in 1. Ann Mc. Guire said to herself, . But the impact is not clean: the coroner. Jumpers who hit the water do so at about seventy- five miles an hour and with a force of fifteen thousand pounds per square inch. Eighty- five per cent of them suffer broken ribs, which rip inward and tear through the spleen, the lungs, and the heart.
Vertebrae snap, and the liver often ruptures. If they go straight in, they plunge so deeply into the water. These corpses suffer from .
Already this year, two bodies have vanished entirely. On December 1. 7, 2. Marissa Imrie, a petite and attractive straight- A student who had planned to become a psychiatrist, left her second- period class at Santa Rosa High School, took a hundredand- fifty- dollar taxi ride to the Golden Gate, and jumped to her death. Though Marissa was always very hard on herself and had lately complained of severe headaches and insomnia, her mother, Ren. The site notes that many suicide methods are ineffective (poison is fatal only fifteen per cent of the time, drug overdose twelve per cent, and wrist cutting a mere five per cent) and therefore recommends bridges, noting that . On Christmas Day that year, Milligan, going through her daughter. Everyone is better off without this fat, disgusting, boring girl.
San Francisco is the Golden Gate Bridge. Imrie used the property with due care for the purposes it was designed. The class poet at Ohio University, class of . His body was never found. The original design called for the rail to be five and a half feet high, but this was lowered to four feet in the final blueprint, for reasons that are lost to history. A plaque dedicated to him at the southern end of the bridge a few months later declared the span . And at the dedication ceremony A.
The Golden Gate Bridge, for my dead friend, turned out to be a mute monument of misery. I spent a day reading through clippings about Golden Gate Bridge suicides in the San Francisco Public Library, hundreds of two- or three- inch tales of woe from the Chronicle, the Examiner, the Call- Bulletin: . Bridge officials turned back fourteen aspirants to the title, including one man who had . A local disk jockey went so far as to promise a case of Snapple to the family of the victim.
That June, trying to stop the countdown fever, the California Highway Patrol halted its official count at 9. In early July, Eric Atkinson, age twenty- five, became the unofficial thousandth; he was seen jumping, but his body was never found. Ken Holmes, the Marin County coroner, told me, . The Bay Area media now usually report bridge jumps only if they involve a celebrity or tie up traffic. Mihara, a volcano in Japan (more than six hundred people jumped into it in 1. Arroyo Seco Bridge, in Pasadena; and the Eiffel Tower.
At Prince Edward Viaduct, in Toronto, the site of nearly five hundred fatal jumps, engineers just finished constructing a four- million- dollar . At all of these places, after the barriers were in place the number of jumpers declined to a handful, or to zero. Richard Seiden, the Berkeley suicide expert, told me.
In 1. 97. 0, the board of the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District began studying eighteen suicide- barrier proposals, including a nine- foot wire fence, a nylon safety net, and even high- voltage laser beams. In 1. 97. 3, the nineteen- member board, most of them political appointees, declared that none of the options were .
The seven- foot- tall mesh of wires had originally been used in Chile to keep cattle out of pine- seedling plantations, and would cost a mere $2. The bridge board would not approve it, however. Barbara Kaufman, a board member, said that the fence resembled the .
He says that a barrier is no longer being actively considered, and that only he and three or four other board members favor one. He laughed darkly, and added, . For the past twenty- five years, however, three hundred and fifty feet of the southern end of the bridge have been festooned with an eight- foot- tall cyclone fence, directly above the Fort Point National Park site on the shore of the Bay. Yet, in October, construction will be completed on a fifty- four- inch- high steel barrier between the walkway and the adjacent traffic lanes which is meant to prevent bicyclists from veering into traffic. No cyclist has ever been killed; nonetheless, the bridge. In 1. 95. 3, a bridge supervisor named Mervin Lewis rejected an early proposal for a barrier by saying it was preferable that suicides jump into the Bay than dive off a building .