Downtown Drama Ends as Desperate Man’s Life Is Saved

In this city renowned for its bad guys and worse news, something good happened Tuesday in downtown Los Angeles: As a crowd stood transfixed, Chuck Miranda, bailiff, became Chuck Miranda, hero, talking a suicidal man off a ninth-story ledge.

The drama, which began to unreel about 10:25 a.m. and ended with the man being committed to psychiatric care, brought the sidewalks to a standstill for more than an hour around the Los Angeles County Courthouse at 1st and Hill streets.

On a deeper level, however, it also offered a case study in how real people behave in a crisis that scriptwriters have turned into an urban stereotype. For as Miranda, a 32-year-old sheriff’s deputy with no experience in crisis negotiation, tried frantically to reason with a despondent man, the throngs below were not cynical. They did not yell, “Jump!”

What they did was talk about what they would do, if it were in their power, to save a fellow human being.

Miranda was patrolling the first floor of the courthouse when he and his partner were called to the ninth floor. Someone, they were told, had thrown a jacket from the cafeteria balcony. They figured it was probably a homeless man.

When they got to the balcony, however, they found a Moroccan man in jeans and an MC Hammer T-shirt standing, arms outstretched, on the lip of the concrete ledge.

“I said, ‘Hey, bud. What’s goin’ on?’ ” Miranda recalled. “I figured I’d just order him off the ledge, and he’d come down.”

Instead the man turned and looked at the bailiffs, his eyes raw with tears.

“Don’t come any closer,” he said.

*

Far below, a crowd was gathering. Four fire engines slid to a stop, lights flashing. News helicopters began to buzz overhead. On the courthouse steps, a homeless man offered regular updates to passersby.

“He’s well-dressed, ain’t no homeless guy,” the poor man told people, rattling a foam cup for spare change. “Course, either way, he’s doomed. Lord say, a soul ain’t yours to give and ain’t yours to take away.”

Someone wanted to know if the man was a lawyer. Someone else speculated he might work in the cafeteria. Maybe he was a juror, a woman with a juror’s tag said. A uniformed police officer unspooled yellow police tape and, just like in the movies, urged the crowds to “move along,” but they would take a few steps and then stop again, their heads thrown back.

At sheriff’s headquarters, Miranda’s bosses tried to summon the department’s regular crisis negotiators, only to be told they were all out at training. Los Angeles police negotiators rushed to the scene.

But time had passed, and with each second, it became clearer that Miranda was the only one to whom the man would speak. At his insistence, three firefighters were ordered to back away from the ledge. Finally only Miranda, his partner, Deputy Colin Matsumoto, and a third bailiff, Deputy Larry Lariviere, were on the balcony, with an LAPD crisis negotiator in the doorway, standing by.

*

“I said, ‘You don’t want to do this,’ ” Miranda recalled. But the man was a font of despair. He was on the street. He had lost people he loved. He was in danger. He was alone. In a rush of sorrow, he narrowed his eyes and began to murmur a Muslim prayer. Then he dangled one foot over the edge.

“Get your foot back where it was!” Miranda ordered him. “Get it back. Now!”

Startled, the man stopped short and Miranda, thinking fast, started asking questions: Did he have a family? Did he like dogs?

“I don’t like dogs,” the man retorted. “I like cats.”

“I have a real nice cat,” Miranda told him. “Sleeps with my dog.”

Miranda talked fast, because at every pause, the man would remember his despondency, narrow his eyes and announce, “This is it.”

In the background, the other two bailiffs edged closer, ever so gradually, while the LAPD negotiator inched his way in. In the heat, the man took off his ball cap and dangled it over the side. Miranda asked: “Do you believe in God?”

Below, in the courtyard of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, a crowd of city workers was setting up balloon-bedecked booths for a ride-share fair. Vainly, they tried to promote carpooling while simultaneously gazing at the man on the ledge. Among the onlookers, a conversation began.

“How sad. To have no hope,” a courthouse secretary murmured.

“Maybe he just got fired,” a man said.

“Or his wife divorced him. Or he lost a house.”

“What they oughta do is throw him, like, a big lasso,” said a 25-year-old courthouse courier with a goatee.

“What I’d do,” a woman chimed in, “is go up in the building across the street and shoot him with one of those beanbag things, just to knock him back off the edge.

“Why don’t these firefighters have air bags waiting on the ground?”

“If I could, know what I’d do?” a young man said. “I’d take the balloons off these booths, all of them, and bring them to him, and he could just kinda float to the ground.”

Above, Miranda gauged the distance between himself and the man. What if he just lunged for the guy’s knees? Would it work?

*

But he thought better of it. The man said he was so tired, so afraid. Miranda said he didn’t need to worry, that there were deputies around to keep him safe.

The man met his eyes. Could he get that in writing? In a “promissory note” from Miranda himself? And so the bailiff pulled out his notebook and wrote: “I promise I will protect you, no matter what.”

He tore out the page.

“I’ll stand over your bed and guard you,” he told the man. “I’ll protect you, even when you sleep.”

The man began to cry, Miranda and his partners said, then to pray, hard and fast, and Miranda shouted, “This is the time! This is the time to come down! I’m going to step toward you, and give you my hand. Will you take my hand?”

On the ground, the crowd fell silent as the man took a step forward, and did. Everyone smiled.

“Thank God,” a woman said. “Thank God.”