Man who died in fall from Pompano drawbridge ignored frantic calls to stop
POMPANO BEACH — Within all likelihood, no one may ever know why a man kept walking up a raised drawbridge in Pompano Beach over the weekend, despite desperate pleas to stop from a horrified bridge tender, motorists and other bystanders.
The mid-Saturday afternoon walk — on a St. Patrick’s Day weekend — ended with him sliding down the raised east side span of the draw, disappearing beneath the roadway and landing on a concrete counterweight below, said Sandra King, spokeswoman for Pompano Beach Fire Rescue.
“The bridge was open and on its way down when this gentleman was walking east to west on the north side of the bridge,” she told the South Florida Sun Sentinel on Monday. “He was walking up the bridge when it was still open and bystanders were yelling at him to stop, as was the bridge tender who was also urging him to stop. He ignored their pleas and just kept walking.”
Homicide detectives from the Broward Sheriff ’s Office continued to investigate Monday why the man, whose identity has yet to be released, took that fatal walk at the bridge that crosses over the Intracoastal Waterway at Northeast 14th Street.
By mid-Monday afternoon, the Sheriff ’s Office confirmed the victim is an adult male and has been identified. But spokesman Carey Codd said the agency is not releasing further information until his next of kin are located and notified.
“At this time, there is no foul play suspected pending an autopsy by the Broward County Medical Examiner’s Office,” Codd said in an email.
The bridge, owned by the Florida Department of Transportation and maintained by a private company, was observed operating normally Monday as motorists, bicyclists and pedestrians including beachgoers passed over it. The span opened for boats that needed clearance without incident.
Saturday night traffic tie-up
King said the city’s fire rescue department received an initial call at 3:22 p.m. Saturday about the man on the bridge.
Witnesses included “a motorcyclist who apparently was the first one at the front of the line waiting for the bridge to close,” King said. “But nobody knew where (the man) went.”
Rescuers located him but it was difficult to extract his body because of where he had landed, she said. Pompano Beach and Broward County Technical Rescue teams “used a combination of ropes, webbing, a backboard and ladders”
to move the body from the counterweight to a mechanical room and to the shore via ladder. He was then lifted to the roadway.
During the recovery, the bridge was closed to traffic for several hours until 8:43 p.m., King said. Officers shut down the causeway to all traffic between State Road A1A on the east and slightly to the west of the bridge on 14th Street.
The closure generated traffic backups on both sides of the waterway as St. Patrick’s Day weekend revelers headed for local restaurants and bars. .
Local residents took to social media to describe how rescuers maneuvered their way amid the labyrinth of obstacles to retrieve the body with ropes and other equipment.
A spokesman for the DOT’s District 4 region said he had no information of any “prior incident history at this bridge.”
But other similar instances exist of people who died in falls at South Florida drawbridges:
At the Royal Park Bridge in West Palm Beach, Carol Wright, 79, died in 2022 when the bridge opened beneath her as she was crossing with her bike.
At a bridge over the Miami River linking downtown Miami and the city’s Brickell district, bicyclist Fred Medina, 58, plunged to his death in 2021 after trying to beat the bridge as its warning arms lowered and a whistle blew, according to police.
At the Sunrise Boulevard bridge in Fort Lauderdale, Lawrence Hirschfield, 75, died in 1988 when he held on to a metal railing as the bridge was being raised. He fell 50 feet to his death after standing on the bridge under the gatehouse and could not be seen by the bridge tender, officials said.