Trying to deter suicides

It’s been three years since Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Deputy Ken Rushing watched 18-year-old Andrew Popp lean backward off the edge of Cold Spring Bridge and disappear into the fog-cloaked gorge below.

The image pops into the veteran deputy’s mind at odd moments, including when he was driving his children to Disneyland recently.

“It got quiet in the car and I saw him again, right before he jumped,” Rushing said. “He gave me a thousand-mile stare. He basically looked right through me. And then he just faded away.”

Popp was the 43rd person in four decades to commit suicide from the bridge. The death of the popular, college-bound athlete in July 2005 proved to be a turning point, galvanizing the public and law enforcement to do something about the growing toll at the graceful, 1,200-foot-long steel arch on California 154.

Opened in 1964, Cold Spring Bridge links coastal Santa Barbara County to the wineries and boutique towns of the Santa Ynez Valley.

Jumpers have ranged in age from 18 to 74, according to coroner’s statistics. The 220-foot fall into a wooded ravine is always lethal, said Sheriff’s Cmdr. Dominick Palera.

“We are also the coroner’s office, so recovery and notification of kin always falls on our shoulders,” Palera said. “It’s never easy. So we started asking, ‘How can we prevent this?’ ”

The most recent suicide, the 44th, occurred in February, when a 60-year-old doctor left his car running and jumped over the thigh-high railing.

Caltrans last summer came up with a $1-million plan to install 6-foot-high safety barriers on top of the existing 30-inch-high concrete railing. The project has the backing of the Sheriff’s Department, the California Highway Patrol and mental health experts.

Barriers deter people who are considering suicide, and sometimes that is all they need to reconsider, said Dr. Lisa Firestone, a suicide specialist at the Glendon Assn., a Santa Barbara mental health organization. Suicidal people are “in crisis, impulsive, not thinking clearly,” she said. “A barrier is a clear stop sign that states, ‘This is not a solution. We care about you.’ ”

Numerous studies have shown that people who attempt suicide once often go on to live full and productive lives without other attempts, Firestone said.

Still, the plan has detractors.

A group called Friends of the Bridge says it would ruin the look of one of the most photographed spots in the county.

“It’s not like the Golden Gate Bridge, where it’s a suicide magnet,” said Marc McGinness, a lawyer and part-time professor at UC Santa Barbara. “It’s had, on average, one suicide a year. And they want to make it look like something you’d find in the inner city over a freeway? Come on.”

The group also contends that barriers don’t work, that at best they divert people to other places or methods. And it disputes Caltrans’ budget, contending that the cost could nearly triple.

That money would be put to better use working to reduce traffic fatalities on the two-lane state highway, McGinness said, adding that there were cheaper, more effective ways to combat suicides, such as installing closed-circuit cameras that could be monitored and call boxes connected directly to a suicide prevention hotline.

McGinness, who lives in the Painted Cave community northeast of Santa Barbara and a few bends down California 154 from the bridge, said the public’s interest is at stake.

“It’s a misallocation of public resources and a governance issue. It’s a nanny-state, Band-aid solution,” he said.

Despite this opposition, the project has broad support, said Caltrans spokesman Jim Shivers. It’s backed by Santa Barbara County Supervisor Brooks Firestone, Assemblyman Pedro Nava (D-Santa Barbara) and numerous local government boards.

“When we hear from the community, the comment we hear most often is ‘Why can’t it go up faster?’ ” Shivers said.

Design alternatives will be unveiled this summer, Shivers said, with construction scheduled to begin in 2010.

California and other states have long looked to barriers as a way to discourage suicides. In San Francisco, Golden Gate Bridge officials began studying them after a 2007 tally revealed that more than 1,300 people had jumped there since 1937.

After Popp’s death, Palera and other law enforcement personnel organized a task force to look into possible solutions. The group concluded that 10-foot barriers would be effective. It also found that Cold Spring Bridge was the leading site for highway fatalities in five counties and that emergency responders faced risks in trying to prevent suicides.

Palera cited an incident last year in which officers saved a man who was already over the railing’s edge, but a sheriff’s deputy came perilously close to going over herself as she grabbed the man’s collar to pull him back.

Shivers said the close call underscores the many risks.

“We’re approaching this as a safety project,” he said. “We are working with our partners to prevent the loss of life.”

Shivers said this would be the first time Caltrans has put barriers on a state-owned bridge.

Cold Spring Bridge was built to replace an old stagecoach road. Travelers often pull over to photograph the stately green arch with its stunning views of the Santa Ynez Valley’s rugged ridges.

Its attraction as a place to jump was immediate. The first suicide came the year it opened.

Rushing, the deputy who tried to help Popp, said his experience made him realize that he couldn’t save everyone. But if barriers deter some suicidal people, he said, that would mean fewer traumatized people left behind.

“Every time I hear someone is on the bridge, my heart just sinks,” Rushing said. “Sometimes we seem calloused in the way we do our job. But believe me, no cop wants to see what I saw that morning.”

--

catherine.saillant@ latimes.com