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golden gate jumpers1937-1999 • 2000-updated: 12.11.23 |
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| know of a golden gate bridge jumper? | |
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1995, male Navy Corpsman Lee |
| 09.08.08, John M., Fresno, regarding: Navy Corpsman Lee, Please help as he was my friend but I did not know his first name. It was 1995 not exactly sure the month. His last name is Lee. (anyone?) |
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10.31.90, 3:30pm, male, died, body not found Ali Baldward |
| 12.29.21, Sarah, toyko, japan, (10.31.90, 3:30pm, male, died, body not found), Ali Baldward, this person was my best friend. I just want everyone to know that they should NEVER jump. It hurts too many people. |
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08.07.89, male, missing Fred C. Friedman |
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07.09.21, Howard Friedman, San Jose, regarding: Fred C. Friedman 8/7/89, My brother died from jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge on this date. There was a bus stopped by his blue Toyota truck that blocked the right lane. There was an off duty bridge PD present as well, from what I had been told. Dense fog and denial by the authorities complicated his demise and reporting this. Also the tide was so strong, it most likely pushed his body far out to sea. He was never recovered. My Uncle Peter Cameron was stationed at the navy base at Alameda and had the Coast Guard search for his body. Our family was called by the bridge authorities to report the truck blocking traffic. One person said they saw him go over the rails, but nothing was followed up. This is be best I can provide. I am shocked that the authorities did nothing but try to say he walked to Marin on the catwalk in the dark on an extremely windy night. He had stated he was going to commit suicide by jumping from the bridge many times over the years. 07.09.21, skyway, sorry for your loss and the hurt it caused you and your family. him never being found is tragic, as there can be no closure. we hope you cope. 07.09.21, Howard Friedman, It's been a long time and my brother's struggle with schizophrenia was equally difficult. I have had decades to get to a place of peace. I just found a load of his notes and medical docs. today. Interesting and difficult to read. It's just not right in my book that my brother is invisible and his death is not noted by the bridge authorities. Took 7 years to declare him deceased. I appreciate your kind words. I have had a great life and remember him in a very loving and positive way. In appreciation- Howard |
| 05.10.89, male |
| 03.04.03, michael j., Occidental, CA., 05.10.89, I jumped of the golden gate bridge and it was a mad rush. After a half a second I blacked out and I then awoke in a car. It was so crazy. Nothing was wrong. just some bruses. I loved it. |
| 03.13.88: full article |
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08.20.85, survived Ken Baldwin, 28 |
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08.07.17, washingtonpost.com, ···There are a few survivors. Ken Baldwin is one of them. He was 28 when he jumped
from the bridge on Aug. 20, 1985. He had a three-year-old daughter and was
suffering from depression. "The moment I saw my hands leave the railing, I knew I wanted to live," he said. He didn’t come to the bridge to romanticize his suicide. It was his second attempt, the pills he’d swallowed hadn’t worked, and he wanted to be done with it. No blood, no body. "I just wanted to disappear," he said. But he surfaced as soon as he hit the water. Bruised and broken, but alive. "The net will definitely make some people think twice about it," Baldwin said. But he’s less concerned about the 30 or people who leap from the Golden Gate than "the thousands and thousands of people every year who commit suicide in other ways who need help.”··· |
| 1985 |
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05.17.22, Jon D., facebook, In 1985, I caught my 2nd wife in bed the the President's son-in-law. A week or two later I got fired from the Sacramento TV station where I worked. I drove to San Francisco with intentions to pursue a similar denouement.
Parked my car at the back gate to the Presidio. I went into the cute German tavern a hundred feet from there and got so drunk I could barely see or walk. But I did do both all the way to the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge, in a blinding rain storm. Without a moment's hesitation, I swung one leg over the railing - and promptly blacked out. When I came out of my stupor... I was caked head to toe, with two inch cover of grit and dirt splashed over me by cars speeding north in ankle deep water, saturated with gravel. I crawled back to the south end of the GGB and took shelter in a MUNI kiosk. Driver of first bus refused to let me board. Figure it was because I was so dirty. So I stood under the eaves spout. I was clean but soaking wet. The second bus driver also denied me passage. Not sure whether it was because I would soak everything in his bus, or the possibility I was a deranged and dangerous psychotic escapee from the nearby Letterman Military Hospital. But the driver of the third bus opened his doors. Took one look at me, and said, "Well buddy, a couple years ago I was where you are now. Somebody kept me from killing myself. Finally. It's my chance to pay it forward. Come in. Sit down. And dry off." |
| 12.1982 |
| 11.13.09, Dreamer, Las Vegas, NV., (12.1982, male, died, body never found), My uncle jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge. Body was never recovered, but he DID jump. It was late at night, December of 1982, I think. He was coming home from playing cards. The Bridge was not on his way home....he made a detour. He car was recovered from the north side of the bridge, in the parking lot. |
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05.15.82 Jack H. |
| 12.18.20, Linda M., OKC, OK, regarding: Jack H 05.15.1982, Jack was my oldest brother and we loved him so much. He lived in San Francisco going to Berkley on the GI Bill. We dont know why he jumped... There was 2 or 3 witnesses, one tried to stop him, but couldn't get to him in time. His body was never recovered |
| 07.30.81: full article |
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| 12.05.80 |
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| 10.08.79: full article |
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09.14.79
Ann McGuire |
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1977 Tullia Tesauro |
| 02.18.17, Barry Young, Los Angeles, CA, My beloved Sister-In-Law. Very, very sad. |
| 03.17.75 |
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| 10.09.73, jumper #500 Stephen Hoag, 26 |
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12.10.23,
dailystar.co.uk, Perhaps most shocking was victim 500 who, on October 9, 1973, jumped and was found lifeless on the rocks below. Television crews reportedly anticipated the morbid milestone and staked out the bridge waiting for footage of a deathly jump. It was 26-year-old hospital technician Stephen Hoag who hopped the hip-high barrier and fell to his death. His mother learned of his suicide that night on the news. |
| 08.15.73 br>Elizabeth A. Paro |
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1970? or 1971? Ronald Miller |
| 02.22.21, Stephen J., Eastsound, I want to set the record straight. My high school friend Ronald Miller in 1970 or 1971 DID NOT commit suicide as was stated in reports. Ron was an athlete and wanted to be a stunt man in the movies. He had a friend filming him when he purposely DOVE off the Golden Gate Bridge as a stunt. He would take the film to Hollywood! The friend doing the filming refused to make the film public and destroyed it. That's how I remember it. |
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1970? or 1971? Michelle S. |
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12.24.70 Robert Dickinson |
| 12.24.20, Dena D., San Jose, California, My brother jumped Christmas eve 1970. 50 years ago. I believe his partner jumped 2 days later. Want to check list. |
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11.08.70 Louis Sales, 29 |
| 03.14.19, Louis, San Antonio, Texas, He was driving along in a panel van and witnesses said he stopped in the middle of traffic and calmly jumped. His death cert shows "Jump from Golden gate Bridge" and his body was found in SF Bay with multiple traumatic injuries. I never got over it in all these years and only share this for him. |
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1969 Barbara Baker |
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09.22.20, Kristin C., Berkeley Ca. Alameda, regarding: Barbara Baker The police chief of Berkeley Ca.’s wife. In 1969. They were my neighbor across the street, John Baker police chief of Berkeley, California had Bloodhounds & random aggressive Geese. |
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04.1968 James Moss |
| 01.11.22, Courtney W., Franklin, oh., regarding: James Moss April 1968, Hospital called family in Illinois to say he was fighting for his life, his car ran out of gas on the Golden Gate Bridge. He passed April 6, 1969. |
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1965 or 1966 Walter Weeks |
| 03.30.19, Harriet K., Oakland, CA. |
| 01.11.65: full article |
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| 12.03.61
Francis Patrick Kennedy, 20 |
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| Mid 1960 |
| 07.26.20, Mark, Boulder Colorado, regarding: Mid 1960, I witnessed a person jumping to their death from below the bridge. I was at the Fort Point walkway outside the fort looking up. The sight and sound of that very few seconds has stayed with me, like it just happened moments ago. All I know is from the paper is a woman jumped that day. To this day 2020 I wish I knew her name and could have talked to her and maybe she could have found help. Rest In Peace, I have prayed for you since that day. ❤️ |
| 01.29.57 James Donald Ross |
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08.24.20, Margaret G., Berkeley, CA, S.F. News, Wed Jan 30, 1957 reads: Cab Driver Leaps From Gate Span: A 54-year-old cab driver leaped to his death last night from the Golden Gate Bridge. He was the 166th known suicide from the span. The Coast Guard recovered the body of James D. Ross, of 1325 Pine-st, just 12 minutes after a highway patrolman flashed word that a motorist had seen a man go over the side. Ross left no notes, but his mother, Mrs. Caroline Ross, 87, said he had been worried about losing his job. He was my great uncle. |
| 11.1954 John Thomas Doyle, 49 |
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Further investigation into Doyle's death discovered he suffered from sleep walking from a young age which lead to speculation that he suffered from dissociation in the moments leading up to his death, as per Unclycopedia. Although we may never know the exact reason Doyle felt forced to take his own life, the Golden Gate Bridge has gained infamy for being a hotspot for people to kill themselves. |
| 1954 Hugh Frasher Cunningham |
| 10.02.18, anon, jumped off the golden gate bridge He was my grandfather 1954 i think is when he jumped. |
| 02.06.48: full article |
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| 07.24.45: full article |
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| 1941-ish, female Madera Wells |
| 10.21.21, Sathya K., Redondo beach, CA., regarding: Great-Grandmother, Madera Wells, 1941-ish |
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08.07.37, male Harold Buck Wobber, 47 first known suicide off the golden gate bridge. |
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The dynamic San Francisco fog was beginning its creep across the Bay, as it does most summer afternoons, when the bus doors swung open and Harold B. Wobber stepped off on August 7, 1937. "It’s a great day," Wobber, 47, said to a fellow passenger, "for what I’m going to do." "What’s that?" the passenger, Lewis Naylor, asked him. "You’ll see," said Wobber, a World War I veteran. They disembarked at the turnstile leading to the gleaming new Golden Gate Bridge, a spectacular marvel of engineering and design. At the time, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world. More than 200,000 people had flocked to the bridge to celebrate its opening on May 27, 1937. But what Wobber was about to do on a Saturday 80 years ago would change the Golden Gate, making it not only a destination for those seeking inspiration but also a place for those haunted by despair. Wobber, a descendant of one of California’s pioneer families, and Lewis, a professor from Connecticut, began their walk across the bridge. The fog closed in on the bridge as they covered just over a mile and half, reaching the Marin headlands and turning back, according to the story that Naylor told an Oakland Tribune reporter that day. Halfway across the bridge, Wobber handed the professor his coat. "This is where I get off," he told the professor. And he began to climb over the railing. Lewis tried to stop him grabbing his belt. But Wobber told him to "go along about your business and leave me alone." Then he broke free and plunged 260 feet to his death, according to the story in the Oakland Tribune the next day. A crowd gathered as Coast Guard boats and harbor patrols searched for Wobber in the churning waters below, fighting the outgoing tide. His body was never found. In the pocket of that coat the professor was left holding, there was a sealed suicide note to Wobber’s 16-year-old daughter, Barbara. There was also a diary, and his entry that day said: "Worked in the garden this afternoon, then went to San Francisco." And there was also a slip for his one-day leave from the Palo Alto Veteran’s Hospital, which expired at midnight that day. The U.S. joined the ‘Great War’ 100 years ago. America and warfare were never the same. Wobber was the first known suicide on the bridge. And soon after he jumped, hundreds and hundreds more followed him. Not only San Franciscans, but people from all over came to end their lives at such a celebrated place. The Golden Gate Bridge became the second-most popular suicide spot in the world, outranked only by the Nanjing Yangstze bridge in China. Local media kept a running count, reporting on the famous cases. A five-year-old girl and her father, the son of Pierre Salinger, President Kennedy’s press secretary, Roy Raymond, the founder of Victoria’s Secret. In 1995, a local shock jock offered a case of Snapple to the family of the 1,000th jumper. When the count reached 1,600 in 2012, most media stopped keeping count. Wobber and all those who followed him confounded bridge officials. They hired patrol officers trained to spot the signs of a likely jumper before he or she even climbs the railing, and put a team of negotiators on call who are experts at talking people back onto the bridge. There are suicide hotlines and phones. This year, as the bridge marked its 80th anniversary, bridge officials finally began construction of a steel mesh net 20 feet below the California landmark’s sidewalk. The suicide barrier will be built over four years, according to the Golden Gate Bridge website, with an expected completion date in 2021. Like so many people who take their own lives, Wobber had struggled with despair for years. He’d been a bargeman before serving in France from 1917 to 1918. He returned to California with PTSD, or what was then referred to as shell shock. He’d gotten a job running a lunchroom on the Oakland waterfront. But he abandoned that job in 1930 and checked into the veteran’s hospital, where he remained for seven years. His wife had divorced him, he missed his daughter, and he found his only solace in the hospital gardens. The medical community was still trying to understand shell shock. They’d seen the same symptoms in Sigmund Freud’s studies of women who were "hysterical." The common link Freud and his contemporaries found among these women? All had been sexually assaulted, said Mary Catherine McDonald, an assistant professor of philosophy at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, whose work concentrates on the trauma suffered by combat veterans. McDonald said that given the dates of his hospitalization and his service history, Wobber may have been subjected to the shock therapy treatment pioneered by Lewis Yealland, which viewed war trauma as a personal failure and included electric shocks to the neck, cigarettes on the tongue and hot plates placed on the back. "You will not leave this room until you are talking as well as you ever did; no, not before … you must behave as the hero I expect you to be," Yealland told his patients. Suicide rates were likely high, but were rarely reported, McDonald said. Wobber’s very public act marked the beginning of the Golden Gate’s transformation into "a suicide magnet." But, just as significantly, it showed the nation the lasting, hidden wounds of a war that the rest of the country had left behind 20 years earlier.  |
| 2.17.37: full article |
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| 1937-1999 • 2000- |
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