NYPD officers climbing Williamsburg Bridge
to rescue man threatening to jump
DAILY MAIL,1
OCTOBER 2018
New York Police Department(nypd) was praised Sunday after saving the life of a man who wanted to jump from the Williamsburg Bridge, talking to him for 75 minutes before they managed to get him down.
Law enforcement received a call at 9.11am and found the ‘extremely emotionally disturbed’ man standing on cables when they arrived on the Manhattan side of the bridge.
Aerial footage shows the shirtless man dangerously walking on top of the bridge’s structure.the lower level is 135ft high and the towers reach 310ft.
Members of the NYPD mounted the structure with safety gear to get closer to the man dangling over the East River and convince him not to take his own life.
‘As we were coming up the FDR Drive, my partner, Detective Longa, noticed an individual on the cables.we came to the foot of the Manhattan side of the bridge, grabbed our equipment and made our way up the walkway,’ Detective Christopher Williams said during a press conference, adding that his training says listening to the victim is a big part of the process.
“I tried to establish a rapport with him, and I also mentioned that nothing that’s going on in his life would be worth ending it for.’’
After an hour and 15 minutes the 7th precinct officers managed to persuade the man to come down from the bridge and hooked him up to a harness and lowered him down.
Longa, who has been with the force 22 years, added to ABC7: ‘‘Once we got him a little lower and he was able to recognize he was actually going to get some help, he was very thankful.’’
The man was then taken for evaluation at Bellevue Hospital.
NYPD Commissioner James O’neill tweeted about his team’s ‘outstanding work’.
He wrote: ‘Every day, #NYPD cops perform amazing acts of bravery and heroism, all in the name of keeping Nyers safe.thank you, @Nypdspecialops, for talking down and bringing to safety this man who was threatening to jump off the Williamsburg Bridge minutes ago. Outstanding work. Stay safe.’ The same officers rescued a 44-yearold woman who scaled the Statue of Liberty on July 4. ‘‘I was standing on the pedestal hanging onto a vent, tied in - so set up a little differently,’’ Williams said.
The Williamsburg Bridge incident was the second attempted suicide in the city this weekend, reports New York Daily News.
On Saturday around 7pm MTA Bridge and Tunnel Officer James Pokruss saw a woman leave her car on the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and hang one foot over the edge.
‘‘My first thought was that it was just a disabled vehicle”, Pokruss said Sunday about his journey toward Staten Island.“but then she started walking towards the front of the vehicle, sort of away from me, which immediately caused alarms to go off.’’
Pokruss says he grabbed the woman ‘just in time’ after shouting ‘No, no, no, don’t do that’.
The woman – who turns 58 next week - looked dazed and remained silent as he soothed her and she was later taken to Richmond University Medical Center.
Pokruss added: “I did what any officer would’ve done in my situation, or any decent human being coming up on a person in distress.”