Witnessing a Suicide
Sunday, December 17th, 2006Holy Crap! Today I saw a man kill himself by jumping off a bridge.
I was walking my dog along the beach here in New York. The Belt Parkway runs along the shore and there was a highway bridge near the beach where I walk the dog.
We had just passed under the bridge when I heard screaming. I turned around and looked up. I saw two people running along the bridge. The second one was screaming while chasing the first one.
Several things went through my mind all at once. First I thought it was two people kidding around. Then I thought the second person was trying to beat up the first one. Then I thought the whole thing was just some silly scene from a movie they were shooting on the bridge. Seeing a movie being shot in New York is not all that unusual.
But then the first guy threw himself head first over the railing and smashed into the ground less than 50 feet from where I was standing. As I later read in the paper, the guy who committed suicide was in his 20s and he had had some sort of mental problems. Manic depression or something like that. The second person on the bridge was his father who had tried to stop him from jumping.
The young man’s name was Titus. Apparently he and his parents had driven to New York from Washington, to visit some relatives for the holidays. During heavy stop-and-go traffic, Titus suddenly decided to jump out of the car and throw himself off the bridge.
After he landed on the ground in front of me, he was still breathing. His father came running down and a bunch of people got out of their cars and stared down from the bridge. Someone called an Ambulance and they picked Titus up a few minutes later.
The paper reported that he died in the Ambulance, on the way to the hospital.
I’ve seen lots of people die on TV. People get shot, people jump, people get disemboweled. When you see those images on TV they don’t really phaze you. But when something like that happens in real life, right in front of your face, it’s like someone kicks you in the gut. I was stunned. I couldn’t believe I was staring right at him as his body hurled towards the ground and landed with a muffled thud.
Anyway, that was my Saturday afternoon. Just another typical New York day. You never know what will happen when you go for a walk here.
