Suicidal Teen Saved By NYPD Sergeant From Jumping Off Manhattan Bridge

A sergeant from the New York Police Department saved the life of a teen who was sitting on the edge of the Manhattan Bridge.

Sgt. William Hart was doing a survey on the Manhattan Bridge on Tuesday evening when some people flagged him down and informed him of a boy who had scaled a fence and was sitting on a railing with nothing in front of him but a 100-foot drop to the ground below.

The boy, later identified as a 13-year-old, was looking straight down which prompted Hart into action. The officer climbed up on the fence near the edge of the bridge to get the teen back to safety.

“I try to engage him in conversation and he didn’t really pay any attention to me, so I hopped up over the fence and he still didn’t really recognize I was there,” Hart said. The teen was wearing a hoodie, glasses and had a backpack as he sat on the railing not acknowledging anyone around him. Hart spent a considerable amount of his time in the NYPD on the Emergency Services Unit, so he knew what to do at such a time, which was to stay calm as he moved and spoke to the boy.

Hart tried to talk to the boy through the six-foot metal fence and when that was futile, he climbed up the fence and sat next to the boy. “I kind of took it in stages. He didn’t respond to my voice on the side of the fence. He didn’t respond to me as I was on top of the fence. So at that point, I decided I had to grab him, or else he was gonna go... My experience, it looked like he was going to jump,” Hart recalled.

The officer reached out and grabbed the boy, who became very compliant and started shivering. The teen was very quiet as the arriving officers took him to Maimonides Medical Center for an evaluation.

Initially, the teen was very upset and did not talk about why he was up there. But he later confessed he had been trying to kill himself for the past two days and that his mother was sick. He also said he hoped someone would reach out to him and save him. The boy, who had a psychiatric history, was back with his parents Tuesday night.

“I am grateful for the opportunity to be able to help him, because I just happened to be there. Who knows how long he would have sat there. I mean, it was cold. He was very upset. Had he jumped, it probably would have been fatal based on the height,” Hart told the press Wednesday.

The teen was the sixth person Hart rescued from jumping off a bridge in his 20 years on the force.

If you have thoughts of suicide, confidential help is available for free at the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Call 1-800-273-8255. The line is available 24 hours, every day.