Man Stopped From Suicide Leap Made Earlier Attempt

Pascal Kareb, who threatened to jump from the peacock sign atop NBC Studios in Burbank Thursday, first tried to jump to his death Monday from the 20th floor of a Century City building, according to police.

After the first incident, in which police pulled the 30-year-old Frenchman to safety, psychiatrists at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center evaluated him for three days and then released him. Hours after he was freed, he climbed to the top of the NBC sign, 150 feet above the ground.

After police saved him a second time, Kareb was taken to Olive View Medical Center in Sylmar, where hospital officials and representatives from the French Consulate said they were working Friday to have him released and flown back to France.

In cases such as Kareb’s, hospital psychiatrists say they rely on what a patient tells them when they have to decide whether the patient should be held longer than 72 hours.

“If you seem to have plausible plans, and insist on leaving, and speak appropriately, we would not have grounds to hold you,” said Dr. Boyd Krout, associate chairman of the department of psychiatry at Harbor-UCLA.

Under state law, if doctors still consider the patient to be helpless or a danger to himself or others after 72 hours, they may hold him for up to 14 days by bringing the case to a judge for a hearing.

According to psychiatrists at Harbor-UCLA and Olive View, most patients at their institutions who are committed for 72-hour holds are kept on for an extra 14-day period with court permission.

Although he and other personnel would not talk specifically about Kareb’s case, Krout said that in general, the patients who are released are “people who are not out of it.”