Officers Rescue Man on Brink of Fall from Overpass

A 19-year-old Lakewood man who lost his girlfriend and his job was pulled to safety by two Los Alamitos police officers early Sunday as he began to plunge from an overpass to a concrete flood channel 80 feet below.

The two officers, Sgt. William E. Barrett and Gary Dean Colley, are not sure whether the young man decided to jump or whether his strength gave out.

The man, whom police did not identify, had been hanging by one hand to a chain-link fence above the Coyote Creek Channel, with his toes clinging to a few inches of pavement along Los Alamitos Boulevard.

Just in Time

The officers are sure that a second or two later their 20-minute rescue attempt would have failed.

“After we got him down, he kept saying, ‘Nobody cares about me,’ ” Sgt. Barrett said. “I told him, ‘Look, someone must have put you and me out on this bridge at the same time.’ ”

Barrett had been driving northbound on Los Alamitos Boulevard about 12:11 a.m. when he spotted a man in white pants crossing over the fence that guards the west side of the overpass.

Barrett immediately called for help and then, in the black of night, slowly began working his way on foot toward the man.

“He began to beat his head against the (fence crossbar), over and over again,” Barrett said. “Blood began running into his eyes. I kept asking him to stop, but he kept doing it.”

By then, Colley had arrived. Barrett was concentrating so intently on the man that he didn’t see that a car had gone around a police roadblock and was barreling toward him with no lights on. Barrett jumped out of the car’s path on Colley’s warning but feared that the man on the fence would jump too, the officers recalled.

Colley, 21, a police officer for three years, said both officers felt “a sense of hopelessness.”

“In most situations, even those which might be more dangerous, you usually have some options,” Colley said. “In this one, if he decided to let go before we got to him, we couldn’t have done a thing about it.”

The man kept repeating: “It’s all over. Don’t you know it’s over?”

Barrett, a 30-year-old eight-year police veteran, said, “We kept talking to him so we could get closer, but I worried that if I turned my head for a second he would be gone.”

Finally the man said, “I can’t hang on any longer.”

By the time the two officers had inched close enough to grab him, he let go. Barrett grabbed him atop the fence from the left side, and Colley jumped onto a guard rail to grab him from the right.

They pulled him over the top of the fence and handcuffed him on the ground as he fought to break free.

Later Sunday, the two officers denied that they are heroes.

“It was a team effort,” said Barrett. “Our fellow officers, plus officers from Cypress and Long Beach, helped keep the traffic clear. Our dispatcher, Melanie Thorp, was unbelievably cool. Whenever you’re successful, it’s because everybody works together.”

The man was taken first to the Los Alamitos Medical Center and then to the Santa Ana Community Hospital’s psychiatric assessment center, where he will remain at least 72 hours.

The officers said the man told them that he used to live in Los Alamitos and that he was depressed about losing his girlfriend and his job recently.

The officers said that when daylight came, they realized that if the man had jumped, he would have missed--by 50 yards--an eight-foot wide, shallow stream running through the flood channel.