Man Who Survived Jump Off Bridge `The Luckiest Guy'

It's hard to know if the man who leaped off the Tacoma Narrows Bridge on Sunday afternoon will ever appreciate how lucky he was.

"Where am I? What happened?" the man asked a fisherman who rescued him. The man stood up, and Paul Antonia tried to drape his coat around the man, but the man yelled at him. "Get your hands off me. I'm all right."

He denied jumping off the bridge but later told Antonia that he was schizophrenic, that he heard voices and, "I just wanted it to be over," Antonia said.

The man, a 32-year-old Gig Harbor resident, is in serious condition in Tacoma General Hospital with shoulder injuries and extensive bruises that are not considered life-threatening.

He is one of two or three people who have jumped from the bridge and survived, since the bridge was re-built in 1950, said Lt. Richard Rice, of the Pierce County sheriff's office. Rice said the plunge is about 190 feet from midspan.

Lucky? "He was the luckiest guy on the face of the Earth," said Ed Troyer, a Pierce County sheriff's deputy who responded to the west end of the bridge.

Troyer estimated the fall was 150 to 180 feet and says if the man had jumped five feet closer to shore or five feet farther out he would have been killed.

Five feet closer and he would have hit the beach. Five feet farther out he would have been in deeper water and probably would not have been rescued, Troyer said.

It was lucky, too, that Antonia, of Renton, and his son were fishing below and rescued the jumper, Troyer said. "They saved his life. He could not have been more lucky," the deputy added.

Antonia, 37, said it was an incredible set of circumstances that caused him and his son, Danny, 9, to be there at the time the man jumped. The other fishermen had left and he and Danny were preparing to leave when Danny suggested they go for a walk down the beach, Antonia said.

They were preparing to leave shortly before 5 p.m. when they heard what sounded like an explosion, "like a sharp crack," Antonia said. They looked and saw a geyser of water splashing 8 to 10 feet in the air.

"We looked at one another, trying to rationalize it," Antonia said, and then when they could see nothing in the water came to the conclusion that it probably was a wave from the swift-moving current hitting one of the boulders.

"You rationalize it away but the thought crosses your mind that someone may have jumped," Antonia said.

It was three or four minutes later, Antonia estimated, that he saw something rolling in the water, but he could not make it out in the diminishing light. "Then I saw what appeared to be a hand."

Antonia raced into the water. He grabbed the unconscious man under the arms, pulled him ashore and was about to check for vital signs when the man began coughing and sputtering. Antonia told his son to run back up the steep hill to the parking lot to get help and call 911.

"I thought he was going to die and stuff like that," Danny said he was thinking as he raced up the hill.

Antonia covered the man with his coat and tried to keep him calm for the 10 to 15 minutes it took help to arrive. The Tacoma Fire Department boat took the man to the Narrows Marina and from there he was taken to the hospital.

Dr. Emmanuel Lacsina, chief medical examiner for Pierce County, believes that the only way anyone could survive such a lengthy fall is to hit feet first.

Antonia credited his son with racing 180 feet up a steep path and waving down a motorist who eventually called for help. "I could not have done it without Danny," he said.

Although he is glad to have helped, the experience was unsettling for Antonia, a traffic-control painter. He called it "frightening . . . I'm not sure I want to visit that scene again."

"I'm still amazed at the circumstances (that led to the man's survival) and I can't help but think there was a reason," he said.