Distraught man on bridge stared into the Blackstone River below him. Police recount rescue.
WOONSOCKET – Sheets of rain poured down on a distraught and suicidal man. He held a bridge railing in the crook of his elbow, high over the swollen Blackstone River downtown on Sunday night.
The man's behavior had kept the focus of determined police officers and rescuers for more than 90 minutes.
They hollered over the noise of driving, torrential rain and tried to keep him talking and undistracted by the whoosh of heavy wind around the Court Street bridge.
"He would get quiet, turn his body toward the river and take his hand off the railing," says the report of Woonsocket police officer Joseph A. Wasilewski Jr., who has training as a negotiator.
"I pled with him to look at me and keep his hands on the railing," Wasilewski recalls.
But Wasilewski feared he had lost his connection with the man.
Conversation broken off, situation falls apart
A firefighter moved in as the man looked straight down, and Wasilewski feared the worst.
The firefighter darted toward the man and lunged at him, trying to get a safety line around his midsection.
Wasilewski and other officers lunged, too. Wasilewski grabbed the man's sweatshirt, but the man slipped away.
The safety line was not on him. The Blackstone raged below.
A life in danger amid heavy rain and howling wind
The drama on the bridge Sunday night is captured in detailed police reports that were provided to The Providence Journal on Wednesday afternoon.
The initial call to the Court Street Bridge came in at 7:13 p.m.
Police Sgt. Jesse I. Nunnemacher arrived to find three police officers talking to the man.
Nunnemacher asked dispatchers to summon negotiators.
He called for the bridge to be closed to traffic and found a location for rescuers to stage on the north side of the Blackstone, downstream from the bridge.
An untalkative man on a perch, fixated on a river
Woonsocket police Sgt. Andrew R. Girard had found the man unreceptive to his instructions about not jumping.
"We spoke to him for an extended period of time," says Girard's report.
The man wasn't interested in talking to someone from his church or from the Community Care Alliance. Girard recalls that the man told him he had stopped seeing a psychologist.
"He did not like to make eye contact with us while we spoke and continued to look down," recalls Girard.
Girard could hear the side the man's shoes tapping the edge of the bridge. He and other officers told the man that he wasn't in any trouble.
The river below was so rough that firefighters could not deploy a rescue boat, according to Wasilewski's report.
The man refused when Wasilewski urged him to come back over the railing and onto the bridge.
Rescue swimmer reaches him in the raging Blackstone
Wasilewski tried to talk with the man about his family and friends and about his workplace and his friends at work.
"Nothing seemed to spark his interest," Wasilewski recalls in his report.
"While we were trying to talk … he would take his hands off the railing and hold onto it by only his arm and elbow," he recalls.
It was about 9 p.m. when the man, resisting all intervention, fell into the roiling river, Nunnemacher says.
The river was about 90 feet below, his report says. The swirling surface was shrouded in darkness.
The officers tried to find the man in the beams of their flashlights.
Firefighters "made several attempts at a swift-water rescue," Nunnemacher said.
Girard recalls that a rescue swimmer reached the man and tried to lift him him above the water. But he slipped away.
He clings to a rope but can't hold on
Woonsocket firefighters had stretched a rope across the river.
At one point, the man clung to it, holding on for more than a minute before the rushing waters pulled him free, toward Kennedy Manor, Girard recalls.
Then, Cumberland Firefighter Kevin Dube connected with the man.
Dube hauled him to the south shore of the river, behind Sheehan Printing.
It was 9:07 p.m., the police say. The man, suffering from exposure, was brought to Rhode Island Hospital.
And Rhode Island dodged a fatality in the early hours of a weather crisis that would wreak havoc all over the state in the next 24 hours.
Reach Mark Reynolds at mreynold@providencejournal.com
This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Woonsocket police, firefighters faced life or death crisis in the storm
