SEATTLE – Sarah Edwards drives on the left side of the street near her office because the body of someone who jumped from the bridge towering overhead once crashed onto the hood of a co-worker’s car.
The bloody aftermath of suicide is so common in the upscale neighborhood that grief counselors regularly visit the offices of Cutter &Buck, the sportswear company where Edwards works. On the bridge overhead, city and state officials are adding suicide-prevention signs and telephones in hopes of reducing the number of people who jump.
“It’s become kind of commonplace,” Edwards said. “You worry about your safety.”
The neighborhood beneath the Aurora Bridge used to be docks and warehouses where suicides went largely unnoticed. But as it morphed into a trendy area full of office buildings, shops and restaurants, the bodies began to fall where people could see them as they work.
“They end up in our parking lot,” said Katie Scharer, one of Edwards’ co-workers at Cutter &Buck, a sportswear company based in the Adobe complex. “Nobody’s ever totally used to it.”
The bridge carries State Route 99 over water at its highest point, 155 feet above the channel connecting Lake Washington and Lake Union, but many jumpers fall onto solid ground. Thirty-nine people have jumped to their deaths during the past decade. The bridge averages three or four jumpers a year, although eight people leaped in 2006.
Working underneath the “suicide bridge,” as the half-mile span has occasionally been called since it was built in 1931, can be dangerous to your physical and mental health.
Paul Pearson, a neighborhood resident whose apartment has a view of the bridge, has a message for potential jumpers: “I’d like to request that you all stop trying to kill yourselves in my neighborhood. I realize this is probably the last thing you want to hear right now in your current state of mind.”
The suicides happen often enough that many locals don’t talk about them.
“They deal with it in different ways,” said Jim Donaldson, communications director for Impinj, a high-tech company that shares a parking lot with Cutter &Buck. “That manifests itself in people not talking about it.”
Grief counselors came to the Cutter &Buck offices as recently as a month ago, but employees disagreed with the notion that the jumpers would force a move.
The toll doesn’t compare to that of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, where suicidal people jump about every two weeks but nearly always fall in the water.
But the situation in Seattle has gotten bad enough to prompt a new suicide deterrence project.
Six emergency phones and 18 signs were installed on the bridge last month to encourage people to seek help instead of jumping. The signs say: “Suicidal?” and give the number of a 24-hour crisis line in bold yellow type.
“Anytime you can interrupt a suicide thought process, you have a good chance of success, at least temporarily,” said L.J. Eddy, the head of the Seattle police hostage negotiation team.
But other cities with anti-suicide signs and emergency phones on their bridges can’t say whether the method has been an effective deterrent.
“Nobody can say we saw an increase in calls or a decrease in jumpers,” Eddy said. “And we can’t measure the potential suicide person, who sees the signs and turns around.”
More tangible approaches – putting up barriers or nets – would be problematic on a bridge that carries as many as 45,000 vehicles a day on one of the main north-south routes through Seattle, said Gregg Hirakawa, spokesman for the Seattle Department of Transportation.
Because of its height and location, the bridge must be inspected using a special truck that dangles a bucket carrying the inspector over the railing. Building up the height of the railing could hamper those inspections.
Railings or netting also could create a wind-sail effect, which could endanger the bridge. And any plans would need to go through a special public approval process because the bridge is a national historic landmark.
The city doesn’t even want to talk about preventing people from walking on the bridge because it offers a pedestrian link between two hilltops. The state has considered moving the pedestrian walkway to an enclosed structure below the bridge, said Stan Suchan, spokesman for the Washington Department of Transportation.
“My hope and the hope of everybody involved is we’ll find that the signs and the phones really do make a meaningful difference here,” Suchan said.
Seattle’s other two major bridges – the Ship Canal Bridge that carries I-5 and the West Seattle Bridge – see few suicides because they are closed to pedestrians.
Because bridge suicides affect many people – from the families of those who jump to the residents of the neighborhood where they fall – officials have given the project a high level of attention, Suchan said.
But he notes that bridge jumpers are only a fraction of the people who commit suicide.
“This is miniscule compared to guns, for example,” Suchan said. When it comes time to spend money on bridge improvements, the community will have to ask, “Could the money be spent better on suicide prevention?”
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