The Final Leap by John Bateson

Kenneth Pattison, filed a claim against the Bridge District alleging that the board was negligent in not providing a suicide barrier. The claim—the first of its kind— was a prerequisite before the district could be sued. The Pattisons said that their son wasn’t under psychiatric care, had never attempted suicide to the best of their knowledge, and would be alive today if a barrier was in place. They didn’t seek a monetary award; they sought a safe bridge. To date, there had been seven hundred confirmed deaths.
    â€œThe Bridge District has already admitted and recognized they have a responsibility to do something about suicides,” said Gene Rosenberg, the Pattison’s attorney. “They’ve trained toll collectors and security guards to recognize and restrain potential suicides, and even installed TV monitors. Legally, once they have embarked on trying to prevent suicides, they are obligated to complete the task in a careful and diligent manner. But they’ve failed to do this; time and again, the Bridge District has refused to put in the one simple, effective measure to stop suicides—a suicide prevention barrier.”
    Attorneys for the Bridge District rejected the claim, and the Pattisons did not take it further. In the ensuing years the mothers of two other jumpers would, though. Meanwhile, the issue of a bridge barrier was revisited because the existing railing was scheduled to be removed, sandblasted, and repainted. In what has to be considered the most ironic moment in the history of suicide prevention, a rally in favor of a barrier was organized on Memorial Day, March 31, 1977, by three religious leaders. One of the three was the Reverend Jim Jones, who called suicide victims “casualties of society” and the lack of a suicide barrier on the bridge a “symbol of social failure.” (Eighteen months later, Jones induced more than nine hundred of his Peoples Temple followers to swallow Kool Aid laced with cyanide in the jungles of Guyana.) The appeal for a suicide barrier went nowhere.
    Twenty years after Bridge District board members decided that none of the barrier designs in the Anshen & Allen study was viable, the suicide barrier had became a forgotten subject, at least by the general public. The jumps, of course, continued as always, observed by innocent witnesses while Coast Guard crews continued to retrieve the bodies as loved ones mourned the deaths. Nevertheless, a feeling arose among suicide prevention advocates that publicizing the problem might be making it worse, resulting in imitative behavior. Clearly it was in the Bridge District’s best interests that the media not report bridge suicides; however, possibly it was in the best interests of those most at risk that suicides go unnoticed, too. Mental health professionals collectively approached local media and asked them to refrain from reporting Golden Gate Bridge jumps when possible. Local media, for the most part, agreed, and for two decades most bridge jumps weren’t covered.
    In 1995 there were forty-five confirmed suicides from the bridge—up from thirty-nine the year before and the highest one-year total in history. Clearly, silence wasn’t working. According to Bridge District engineer Mervin C. Giacomini, writing in a report to the board, “The statistics show that the majority of suicides were pedestrians (83 percent), most jumped from the east side of the Bridge (82 percent), and most occurred during daylight hours (77 percent).” Giacomini did not note—but a subsequent report did—that 76 percent of jumpers were men. In addition, 77 percent were under the age of fifty, and 24 percent were under the age of thirty, evidence that Golden Gate Bridge jumpers tended to be considerably younger than suicide victims in general. About two-thirds of all jumps were witnessed.
    Despite the record number of deaths, the Bridge District board accepted the recommendation of