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The Height of Despair

Most of us see the Coronado Bridge as a quick way across San Diego Bay. Some see it as a drive toward their final destination.

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A YOUNG WOMAN, barely 17, sits on a concrete ledge high above the deep, unforgiving waters of San Diego Bay. She is prepared to shuffle off this mortal coil and leave everything—aspirations, fears, her history and her future, her passion and her pride—on the other side of one fatal leap into darkness. Seventeen years old.

How can you fathom what is going through her mind? What can you say to silence her inner demons?

This was not a neatly wrapped hypothetical facing Coronado police officer Bob Kline one balmy afternoon as he sat engaged in conversation with a woman intent on ending her life. They talked to each other on the very edge of the San Diego–Coronado Bay Bridge, a gusting wind pushing at their backs and a sheer drop of 200 feet facing them, straight down into the chill waters below.

“She was sitting on the ledge with her feet hanging over the side,” Kline recalls. “She had failed her entrance exam at Stan - ford, and she felt like she had let everybody down.”

The two of them sat there at that dizzying height for more than two hours, while Kline ever so gently drew her out and pieced together her story. “I still remember her telling me about her family,” he says. “Her brother was a doctor. Her sister was a lawyer. Apparently, her father was pretty upset about her failing the exam.”

Finally, Kline was able to talk her down from her precarious perch. “I told her, ‘Look, you’re just 17 years old. You still have so many chances. But if you go over the edge, you don’t get another chance. Jumping from this bridge isn’t going to give you another day. There won’t be another day.’”

The encounter took place years ago. Some details—the color of the young woman’s hair, the clothes she was wearing—have faded from memory. But Kline says the words they exchanged stay with him still.

A trained hostage negotiator since 1991, Kline has lost count of the number of people he has talked down from the Coronado Bridge, but it exceeds 30. “Two a year at least,” he says. During that 17-year period, only one encounter ended in suicide.

When someone is reported on foot on the bridge, the agency that arrives first—Coronado Police, San Diego Police, California Highway Patrol or the Sheriff ’s Department—immediately begins to coax that person from the edge. But there have been cases in which Kline and others didn’t have an opportunity to intervene.

“Sometimes we get a report of a vehicle stalled on the bridge, and when we get up there, we find a car with a note inside,” he says. “That hits pretty hard, because we didn’t even have a chance.”

PEOPLE LIVING in San Diego or its environs are familiar with the iconic Coronado Bridge, the graceful, sky-blue span connecting downtown San Diego to the “island” of Coronado. Since it opened in August 1969, the so-called Big Blue has served as a backdrop in several Hollywood films and taken center stage in countless brochures and postcards touting the good life in our palm-studded paradise. Just as the Golden Gate Bridge is an emblem of San Francisco recognized around the world, the Coronado Bridge is a towering symbol of San Diego. But there is a dark footnote under - lying that elegant structure with its equally elegant arches—the Coronado Bridge is the third-deadliest span in the United States in terms of suicides, trailing only the Golden Gate and the Aurora Bridge in Seattle.

The San Diego Harbor Police Department, which recovers bodies from the bay, keeps records of apparent bridge-related deaths. According to Rennie Gregorio, supervisor of the records division, as of January this year, 233 deaths have been linked to the Coronado Bridge since its 1969 opening. The annual tallies vary markedly, from 16 in 1980 to none in 1985.

“Most likely they are all suicides,” Gregorio says. “But unless we have a witness, we can’t be absolutely certain. I think we can safely assume, though, that only a handful are accidental deaths.”

The county medical examiner’s office began keeping its own detailed account of suicides from the Coronado Bridge in 1997. As of January, the office had identified 69 people, ranging in age from 17 to 82, who jumped from Big Blue to their death.

The crisp spreadsheet reads, in terse detail, like a litany of lost souls: February 12, 1997, male, 25, jumped from Coronado Bridge to water below . . . May 7, 1998, male, 82, jumped from bridge to bay below . . . June 14, 1999, female, 32, jumped from bridge into San Diego Bay . . . October 16, 2000, male, 17, jumped from bridge to water below . . . August 2, 2005, male, 25, secured car jack to wrist for weight and jumped from bridge to water below. The list goes on and on, each line a wrenching post script to a reallife story.

In addition to lists kept by the county medical examiner and San Diego Harbor Police, records of suicide-related deaths from the Coronado Bridge are kept by the California Highway Patrol. But there is no single agency that tracks the total number of attempted suicides—the fortunate ones who are dissuaded from ending their lives. According to some estimates, for every death by suicide from the Coronado Bridge, as many as 10 people are talked down to safety. Based on Kline’s experience, the ratio of lives saved could be much higher.

Add to the human toll the New Year’s Eve death of an Oceanside police dog after a high-speed chase ended on the bridge. Stryker, a six-year-old Belgian Malinois, was instructed to pull a suspected drunken driver to the pavement. The driver, Cory Byron, 27, allegedly grabbed Stryker and jumped into the bay. Byron survived the 200-foot fall. Stryker did not.

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