The 24-year-old man straddled the top of the fence on the Redan Road bridge over I-285 around noon Sunday, telling the four police officers below he wanted to die, and telling his wife he loved her.
“The officers were close by to him but they didn’t want to push his intentions,” Sgt. Shaun Harris told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution this week. “He was on the outside of the fence, on the side where the interstate was, so all he had to do is take one leap and he was gone.”
Video from a cellphone captured the tense moments as motorists, caught in the massive traffic jam, watched officers suddenly scurry up the fence, with one grabbing the man’s arm and another his pants, pulling him to safety.
Innovative and quick thinking helped police avoid the kind of tragedy suffered by other distraught individuals who jumped from metro Atlanta overpasses in recent years.
The 24-year-old man, identified by his wife as a military veteran, was taken to Grady Memorial Hospital, where police released him without charges. The AJC has chosen not to identify the man and his wife by name.
What prompted the man to climb the tall safety fence was still unclear Tuesday. His wife said he had left their nearby apartment angry and she found him on the fence, according to a police report.
Metro Atlanta motorists have witnessed multiple jumper incidents over the past few year. In June of last year, a man jumped to his death from a Spaghetti Junction overpass. Ten days earlier in the same area, another man committed suicide by jumping off an overpass.
On Sunday, a motorists flagged down DeKalb Officer A.C. Trahan about the man on the Redan Road bridge over I-285, and Trahan alerted other officers, among them the department chaplain.
“[The man] stated if any officer came close to him that he was going to jump,” Trahan wrote in his report.
The police feared he was going to jump regardless. Harris had an officer on the interstate position tractor-trailers in the northbound lanes right below the man to create a semi platform to break his fall. He took aside Officer T.T. Middlebrooks, a former semi-pro football player, and ordered, “The first opportunity you grab him.”
Moments later, the man started climbing sideways toward the southbound lanes where no trucks would break his fall.
He was just above the last tractor-trailer when the 33-year-old Middlebrooks quickly climbed the fence and grabbed the man’s arm. As he held on, the man’s feet dangled over the highway. Trahan and another officer also grabbed the man.
Middlebrooks said he bore down with all his weight as he held on to the man.
“My mind was saying, ‘Don’t lose him,’ so I was trying to find the right time and the right moment to grab him,” Middlebrooks, who became a cop a little over a year ago, told the AJC. “Once I grabbed his arm, I just held as tight as I could and the other officers swung into action quickly.”
As the three officers held on to the 173-pound man, Officer David Findlay rushed to get above him.
“They had hands on this guy and, in my opinion, it looked like he was slipping away,” the 36-year-old officer said. “I grabbed a handful of pants and pulled with everything I had to pull him back over.”
After the man was brought down he was placed in an ambulance and the interstate was reopened.
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