Allentown bridge’s convenience makes it a deadly lure ** Albertus Meyers span draws growing number of suicide jumpers.
By THE MORNING CALL
PUBLISHED: November 30, 2003 at 5:00 a.m. | UPDATED: October 5, 2021 at 12:21 a.m.
Joel Santa hit the brakes on the drive home over the Albertus L. Meyers Bridge in Allentown and dove head first — arms outstretched — over the side into the darkness.
“Alcohol and poor judgment, a bad combination,” said Santa, 33, as he recalled the 1993 leap that left him in a wheelchair. “It wasn’t premeditated by any means.”
The bridge has been attracting jumpers for nearly 90 years, but this year has seen an unprecedented spike in the number of jumpers, prompting city and Lehigh County officials to push for a fence. Of 13 people who have jumped from the bridge this decade, more than half did so this year.
No one is certain why there has been a threefold increase this year, but officials and experts offer a combination of reasons that make the bridge a magnet for suicidal people.
Although serious underlying problems such as broken relationships and financial woes make people suicidal, the act often is impulsive, and the Meyers bridge is accommodating. It is a short walk from center city, an easy scramble over a 4-foot high barrier, its more than 100-foot-drop virtually guarantees death and it has a reputation as a place to go to end your life.
The latest bridge-jumper was a 21-year-old city man, wearing a skull-and-crossbones sweatshirt, who leaped on Nov. 13. He joined the more than 50 others who have jumped from the bridge linking center city to south Allentown since the span opened in 1913. Except for Santa, all have died — including seven this year.
“I think something really needs to be done,” said Lehigh County Coroner Scott Grim.
Bridge height a factor
It started 88 years ago with William C. Kleinsmith, a down-on-his-luck boilermaker from Allentown.Kleinsmith’s leap off the bridge in 1915 was chronicled in a page one story in the Allentown Chronicle that reported the 57-year-old suffered “ill health and poverty and the myriad disabilities inseparable from such conditions.”
Kleinsmith jumped two years after the bridge was dedicated at ceremonies featuring the Allentown band, led by conductor Albertus L. Meyers. In 1974, the bridge was named in honor of Meyers, who conducted the band for 50 years.
The jumpers come from all walks of life. The bridge has attracted everyone from business executives to factory workers to doctors. In the 1930s, about one person a year jumped off the bridge, widely called the Eighth Street bridge.
One September day in 1938, two people went to the bridge hours apart to take the plunge. An unemployed millworker jumped and died. A few hours later, in what police said was an unrelated incident, a 39-year-old woman was foiled in three attempts to jump. A passerby stopped the woman’s first two attempts and a toll-taker pulled her off the railing on her third try. She was taken by police to headquarters, where she tried again to kill herself by tying a bedsheet to prison bars. She was stopped from hanging herself.
Through the years, nearly all of the jumpers have been men. At least one was coaxed off the bridge a few years ago, only to return a few months later and make the fatal fall.
Ronald Manescu, Allentown’s assistant police chief, said the bridge attracts jumpers, in part, because of the publicity that is generated each time there is a death.
When local residents are down or frustrated, they have a catch-phrase that they use: “I think I’m going to jump off the Eighth Street bridge.”
Most of the time they are joking.
Manescu said height also is a reason people jump.
Jumping off the 138-foot high point of the bridge is like falling out the window of a 14-story building, hitting the Little Lehigh Creek at about 50 mph. Jumpers, though, typically use the middle of the bridge, where the distance to Martin Luther King Jr. Drive below is about 100 feet.
People who jump off the 15th Street bridge, which is 20 feet high, and the Tilghman Street bridge, which is 70 feet high, often “end up hurting themselves more than anything else,” Manescu said.
Lt. Randall Miller of the Bethlehem Police Department said his city’s bridges do not have the height for fatal leaps, so there have been cases “where the person jumped and lived.”
The city’s higher bridges are over water, and the Minsi Trail Bridge has a chain-link fence that discourages jumps.
Each bridge has had jumps or suicides, Miller said. But Bethlehem has not had a suicidal leap from a bridge since December.
Grim said there are three reasons the Meyers bridge attracts jumpers: “The height, easy access, location.”
Bill Vogler, executive director of Family & Counseling Services of Allentown, said people use whatever means is most convenient to commit suicide.
The Albertus Meyers Bridge is convenient.
Stress and suicide
There were 22 suicides in Allentown in the first nine months of this year, compared with 15 all of last year, Grim said. Nationally, the most recent statistics show a marginal increase in suicides in 2001.
Vogler said he suspects the poor economy is behind the increase in suicides in Allentown.
Grim said his investigators constantly hear the same stories from surviving family members.
“The two key issues are relationship and financial issues,” he said.
Grim said stresses can drive people to suicide. A broken relationship, recent arrest, job loss or the loss of a family member “can do it,” he said.
Although alcohol often is the catalyst that drives people to jump, Grim said that usually there are underlying problems that have brewed for years.
Terri Mertz, a recently retired lieutenant in the Allentown Police Department, said broken relationships were almost always what pushed people to the brink.
“You know, the boyfriend gets all liquored up and decides I’m going to show her,” said Mertz, who talked a half-dozen people off the bridge during her 22-year career.
Mertz said she would talk to people “like your best friend” when they were on the bridge.
“You find out what’s going on. Who they are. Get to know them on a first name basis,” she said in a telephone interview from Nags Head, N.C.
The people she saved all had something in common: They were “very drunk” and possibly taking drugs, she said.
Talking people off the bridge takes more than acting skills, Mertz said.
“You can’t play “you care,”‘ she said. The Hollywood stereotype of “I’m a tough guy and going to grab you off the bridge and be done with it” also doesn’t work, she said.
“You have to develop a bond with them,” she said. To that end, she would ask what was bothering them and tell them there are people who care about them.
As a last resort, she said, she would tell them “tomorrow will not be as painful as today.”
“And if you think I’m lying to you, do it tomorrow.”
Difficulty fencing bridge
On Oct. 9, city police spotted a man sitting on a bridge rail. A 30-minute drama played out while a police negotiator tried to coax the 33-year-old terminally ill cancer patient off the railing. A handful of people gathered on a street corner near the end of the bridge and watched as the man leapt to his death.
Paula Hill, 49, of 721 W. Union St., shook her head when it was over.
“They need to put a fence up here,” Hill said. “They should have put it up last year after two people died jumping off there. Why are they waiting all this time?”
In September, city officials raised the issue with the state Transportation Commission. City Health Bureau Director Barbara Stader fears a bridge jumper will crash through a car windshield on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive causing a “double tragedy.”
Stader wants a tall fence because the bridge’s concrete rail is only 4 feet high. She also wants a call box installed on the bridge to give desperate people other options.
The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation usually does not put fences on bridges to prevent suicides, but the Meyers Bridge may be an exception, said agency spokesman Ron Young.
“There’s been a lot of attention to this one particular bridge lately,” Young said. “We’ve gotten requests from the city of Allentown, the Health Bureau, and there have been some phone calls and requests from the public to have this done.”
Last week, PennDOT officials said a fence would not be going up any time soon and that no plans would be drawn up until funding is in place.
PennDOT engineer Walter Bortree said the preliminary estimate for a fence is $250,000.
PennDOT officials have said money is not the only factor. The bridge, the largest concrete-and-steel span in the world when it was built, is on the National Register of Historic Places. Any changes require approval of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, and a fence could ruin the bridge’s historical integrity, officials say.
Beyond historical concerns, Bortree said, a fence still may not fix the problem.
Bortree said an argument could be made that, no matter what barrier was erected, “it would not preclude anyone from climbing up and attempting to jump off the bridge if they so desired.”
However, barriers have worked on bridges and landmarks around the world. Suicides dropped dramatically when barriers were placed atop the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Empire State Building in New York City. The same thing occurred in Pasadena, Calif., when a barrier was built on the Arroyo Seco Bridge.
Vogler said anything that can interfere with acting on a suicidal impulse might help.
“I think it’s generally fair to say that a lot of suicides are preventable and are acts of impulse,” Vogler said. “So if you had a telephone on the bridge that people could contact crisis [hotline], or a way to immediately thwart that impulse, you would be likely to reduce some [suicides], not saying all of them. If someone wants to kill themselves, they will kill themselves.”
Stader said that even though suicide sometimes is not preventable, “maybe we could make it a lot more difficult and give people another chance.”
Alan L. Berman, executive director of the American Association of Suicidology in Washington, D.C., agrees. Berman said fences generally work because they force people to stop and think about what they are doing, rather than simply acting.
“There is reasonable data on other barrier jump sites that they do indeed prevent suicides,” Berman said. “Sure it’s a good idea.”
“I just saw the moon’
Joel Santa’s life-changing moment occurred on a January 1993 night while driving with his then girlfriend to his south Allentown home after a party in Whitehall Township.
What was he thinking?
“I couldn’t even tell you,” says the man with tattoos over 80 percent of his body He said he had been drinking and doesn’t remember much of the fall.
“I just saw the moon. I think it was a full moon that night,” he said. “When I went over the side I kind of realized what I did and felt like what the [expletive].”
Santa said he landed on his feet after the two-second fall.
The impact compressed his spine, pushing a vertebra into his spinal column and leaving him confined to a wheelchair.
Santa says the bridge attracts jumpers for several reasons.
“It’s free,” said Santa, who owns Hellbound Tattoo parlor on Hamilton Street in Allentown. “It doesn’t cost any money to kill yourself on it. If you do it with drugs, you have to buy them. If you want to shoot yourself, you need a gun.
“It’s there. It’s accessible. Anybody can walk to it.”
He had two things going for him. He hit trees on the way down that cushioned his fall. And he didn’t jump from the highest spot on the bridge.
With the exception of Santa, the bridge has always been a sure thing.
“I just jumped,” he said. “I didn’t stand there. I didn’t complain about it.”
A decade later, he has a daughter and a business.
“I’m glad I survived,” Santa said.
joe.mcdonald@mcall.com
610-820-6579
Morning Call reporters Ann
Wlazelek and Manuel Gamiz Jr. contributed to this story.
*** where i live there's a certain bridge where people go to end it all.
