Guardian of the Golden Gate speaks at DMAX Foundation’s Third Annual Spring Event
Sgt. Kevin Briggs has talked more than 200 people out of jumping off the bridge
LOWER MERION >> In the Talmud it says: Whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.
Retired California Highway Patrol Sgt. Kevin Briggs has saved the world many times over in the course of his 24 years patrolling the Golden Gate Bridge, a landmark that is a fatal attraction for many trying to end their own lives.
Briggs, 54, who spoke at the DMAX Foundation’s Third Annual Spring Event at the Shipley School recently, now devotes his time to working on the issue of suicide prevention.
While he loves the Golden Gate Bridge, a beautiful San Francisco icon that attracts tourists from around the world, “it also has a dark side,” he
said.
“Imagine walking on that bridge, walking on that sidewalk and seeing someone like this,” he said, showing a picture of a person who had climbed over the edge of the bridge and was standing on the “chord,” a 32-inch wide beam that runs along the side. “What do you do? Do you keep walking as if you did not see this individual? Do you stop and say, how can I help?”
“When I first started on the bridge, I didn’t even know this was going on and I grew up in Marin County (outside of San Francisco),” Briggs said. “I had no training. It was terrible. I remember my first call. I went to a young woman over the rail. I did not know what to say, how to act. I just kind of walked up to her real quick [and said] ‘What are you doing? You’re going to get hurt.’ It was terrible. I did everything wrong. It was years later until I finally got some training.”
But over the years, Briggs managed to successfully speak with more than 200 people and persuade them not to jump from the bridge. Listening to understand them was the key, he said. He would go up and ask the person’s permission to talk to them and then position himself beneath them.
“We want to build that rapport with them,” he said. “It really works out well most of the time. We do lose folks. I’ve lost folks… It’s extremely serious. It hurts my heart that I’ve failed. They will forever be in my mind. It takes a toll.”
He described a situation where an inebriated man was threatening to jump and wanted to talk to Briggs instead of the responding officer. “Everything is going wrong with him,” Briggs said. “He is mad at the world.” His goal is to have the would-be jumper speak 80 percent of the time and him 20 percent.
Briggs spoke to the man for quite a while and “I can’t find a hook,” said Briggs. “He gets madder. He starts looking down at the water, a bad sign.” Briggs said he was going to step back if the man would promise not to do anything in the meantime. “He’s still mad but he was in the Army. I was in the Army. So we had that connection. He said, ‘Nobody in my family loves me.’” Briggs got him to admit there was one person. “I said, ‘How is it going to make them feel if you’re gone? He started tearing up. I could tell that I was getting to him. So we started focusing on that a little bit… And then he turned around… He was holding the cable. He put a foot out and started doing this really deep, labored breathing. To me, that’s a sign he was going to go.” He clapped loudly and yelled. That startled the would-be jumper and after another 20 minutes or so of conversation, the man came back over the rail.
“It takes courage to do that,” said Briggs. “They are starting a new life… It’s a rebirth. The look in their eyes is amazing, like a new baby.”
Another would-be bridge jumper, suffering from mental illness, had a $200,000 hospital bill for his premature baby and had lost his job.
“All I did was listen,” said Briggs. “He decided on his own to come back over the rail. I asked him what I did. He said, “’You listened.’”
Of the 44,000 deaths by suicide in the U.S. annually, about half use firearms, 26.7 percent are through suffocation, 15.9 percent with poison and 7.5 percent by other means, he said. Many times the person is mentally ill and has stopped taking their medication. Other causes can be poor nutrition, environmental factors, substance abuse, traumatic brain injury or genetics. People who try to commit suicide and are unsuccessful usually say they regretted their action a second later, he said.
“My grandfather lost his life to suicide,” Briggs said. Briggs himself became depressed after being injured in a collision while on his motorcycle on patrol and later suffering a heart attack. When he was a young man in the Army he was treated for testicular cancer. He’s had therapy for depression and takes medication and also finds that meditation helps. Talking to other people is also useful, he said.
“If you keep stuff bottled in, it’s not good,” he said.
Briggs, who has written a book about his experiences, “Guardian of the Golden Gate,” travels a lot, giving talks about suicide prevention. A divorced father with two sons, he got a message once after flying back to San Francisco from his younger son, Travis, that he needed to “get here quick.” His older son and namesake had broken an iPad and was threatening to kill himself. He found Kevin Jr., then 13, in the backyard pacing, he said. Briggs put his hand on his shoulder and his son began crying.
“We sat in the backyard a long time,” he said. “I didn’t think that I was pressing him for good grades.” But his son said that he felt pressured, he said. When Briggs would travel, he would tell Kevin Jr. that he was in charge and the “man of the house,” leading to more pressure. And kids at school were pushing his son to smoke marijuana, said Briggs. “He was ready to cash out. He’d had enough.”
His son got counseling and in the first session the therapist asked him if he was cutting himself and he made a cutting gesture on his arm. “How could I have missed this?” Briggs asked. “I’m going around talking to everyone else and it’s happening at my own house.” After therapy, his son is now doing better, Briggs said.
But, Briggs said, teenagers “don’t see the future.” Many times if it’s a teenager who is going to jump, they don’t wait to be talked off the bridge by CHP.
“Very seldom do we get to help a teenager,” he said. If someone is threatening to commit suicide, do not keep it secret, he said in response to an audience question. Make sure they are not left alone and that they get help.
“Tell someone,” he said. “There is help. There is hope.”
But more than half of those who think about suicide don’t tell anyone.
After struggling with depression, Dan Maxwell was 18 when he took his own life in 2013, said his mother, Laurie Burstein-Maxwell, who founded the DMAX Foundation with husband, Lee Maxwell, to honor their son’s memory. The foundation sponsors student led, mental health clubs at colleges to facilitate students’ conversations about depression and other mental illness, along with reducing stigma and isolation. A successful year-long pilot program at Elon University in North Carolina has led to a new DMAX Club at Penn State and a club is in the works at Drexel University. More clubs are planned for colleges in the Philadelphia area, she said.
“It keeps me alive,” The Bryn Mawr resident said about the foundation, which has raised about $60,000, from individuals and corporate sponsors.
Lee Maxwell said, “We can make a difference and we have to make a difference. Mental illness can be a horrible sounding two words… My son was challenged.” After Dan died, they read what he had written and found out that he had cried himself to sleep many nights, Maxwell said. “He was a competitive athlete,” he said. “He was not a quitter.” People can talk about mental illness as a challenge, he said.
“Befriend each other, make community, don’t be ashamed,” he said.
“Imagine walking on that bridge, walking on that sidewalk and seeing someone like this... What do you do? Do you keep walking as if you did not see this individual? Do you stop and say, how can I help?” — Retired California Highway Patrol Sgt. Kevin Briggs