OUT OF THE OFFICE: Tale of a Suicide: A Life-Ending ‘Option’ We All Deplore

John Maa, MD, FACS

On the Friday evening of Memorial Day weekend in 2015, I was driving into San Francisco across the Golden Gate Bridge. Northbound traffic was heavily congested around mid-span, as the right lane was closed. Emergency vehicles with flashing lights redirected traffic to the left lanes. As I approached the bottleneck, I noticed a backpack leaning against the railing and saw two bridge security officers who appeared to be gesturing in the direction of Alcatraz. I quickly realized that they were pointing not at the prison, but instead at a person holding his head in his hands and seated on the ledge outside the railing.

I drove to the southern end of the bridge as police cars with sirens blaring raced toward the scene. I parked in the south lot, and began walking back toward Marin. The skies were gray, and the red lights of the patrol vehicles colored both the water below and the clouds above. As I approached the toll plaza I noticed a new color flickering on the water’s surface. It was from the distinctive white flare that is dropped by Bridge security to mark the spot where a person has fallen and guide search-and-rescue efforts by tracking the direction of the currents.

A gray Coast Guard vessel matching the color of the sky could now be seen racing westward to the scene from Fort Baker, just past the north end of the bridge. It paused near the smoke of the flare and then continued to the other (i.e., west) side of the bridge, where it stopped and circled. It lay motionless on the water for about four minutes and could then be seen rushing back toward Fort Baker, where an ambulance was waiting. As I kept walking toward the site of the bottleneck, I saw that traffic had again begun moving normally. A grim-faced bridge security officer drove past in a small white vehicle that was otherwise empty.

I reached the site of the disturbance, which was now deserted without any trace of the preceding events. As I turned and walked back to San Francisco, I passed joggers, pedestrians and tourists who likely knew nothing of what had just taken place. On returning to the south plaza, I noticed that the ambulance had not left Fort Baker.

I had with me the trauma surgery call pager for Marin General Hospital, where bridge victims are brought if there are still signs of life after their extraction from the cold waters of the bay. The trauma pager was never activated in the hours after this event.

In 2014, the Golden Gate Bridge board of directors unanimously approved the installation of a safety net to deter suicide attempts and raised funds in hopes of beginning construction by late 2017. Thank you to those who have dedicated their time and efforts to erecting a safety barrier on the bridge. Before long, hopefully, events like this will be only a distant memory.

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Dr. Maa, a surgeon at Marin General Hospital, is past president of the Northern California chapter of the American College of Surgeons.
Email: maaj@marigeneral.org