Surviving a death leap off the Golden Gate Bridge

PHOTOGRAPH by People magazine

On Sept. 25th, 2000, my good friend Kevin Hines jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge.

Deciding to take his own life, compelled to surrender to the symptoms of his bipolar disorder, he skipped school and polished off a bag of Skittles as he rode a city bus toward his destiny.

He was just a kid really, barely 19, as he leapt from a crowded public walkway of the iconic structure known worldwide for its art-deco grandeur and fatal allure for people seeking to end their own lives.

His first thought the moment his body tumbled over that railing?

“What did I just do?” he asked himself. “I don’t want to die.” 

He tried to scream, but the force of tumbling 220 feet, comparable to a leaping off a 25-story building, sucked the air from his lungs. 

Hurtling in midair at 75 miles an hour, he twisted is body to hit the water feet first, his best chance at survival. For many jumpers, the impact causes ribs and vertebrae to shatter, puncturing major organs that tear away from tissue and bone. 

Some survive the fall but drown in the frigid bay waters. Many are left paralyzed.

It took Kevin three-and-a-half seconds to hit the water -— one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four Missi — boom!

The impact fractured an ankle and shattered three vertebrae in his back. 

But my friend Kevin didn’t die.

A wrestler in good shape, his body simply would not yield to the impact or to the throes of his disease.

Now 38, Kevin remains in the grips of his mental illness. He has already tried to kill himself, and knows he might try again. 

He’s ping-ponged from manic episodes to debilitating depression, relying on coping strategies that involve regular exercise and telephone therapy sessions with his wife, Margaret, when he suddenly feels anxious.

But here’s the thing: Kevin wants to still be here tomorrow.

His therapy also involves talking, writing and making films about depression and suicide.

As a lecturer, he addresses 300 audiences a year. Hines is a chameleon in a power suit, his frail psyche temporarily projecting the forceful voice of a storyteller — a seen-it-all AA disciple, a Sunday morning preacher with a sermon to deliver.

He wears the suit as a symbol of control, not for his audience, but himself.

But where the public senses strength in his public persona, Hines feels weakness. “People see me in that suit and they assume that I’m recovered,” he says. “I’m not. And I tell them so. But I am living in recovery every single day.”

There’s also his guilt over people he let down. Kevin once asked his adoptive father Patrick if he was still afraid his son might try to kill himself.

“Every time the phone rings,” his father said, “I ask myself ‘Is Kevin still alive?’”

That’s heartbreaking, Kevin says now. “My actions did that.”

His latest work, part of his Mental Health Marvels Podcasts, is a series of interviews he calls My Brother’s Keeper, featuring interviews with young African-Americans who have who have triumphed over great adversity growing up Black in America.

Kevin knows all about that. He’s a compassionate interview who’s been there himself, finding his way in a hostile world.

Kevin has also written a memoir, Cracked, Not Broken and produced a documentary, Suicide: the Ripple Effect.

In one scene, he floats just below the orange-hued bridge, inside a U.S. Coast Guard cutter with the officer who pulled him from the frigid bay currents that day. As the Golden Gate span rises out of the fog, looming straight ahead, Hines begins to weep as he relives his fall and instant regret.

“I was right over there, right over there,” he says, pointing to the water. “I thought I was hallucinating. I thought ‘I could not have just done that. This is not real. I’m not in this water. I didn’t just jump off that bridge. It didn’t happen.’”

Then, he says, he started to pray. “I said ‘God, please save me. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I made a mistake.”

In the film, he reaches over to take the officer who saved his life into a long embrace. The hug is a critical part of Hines’ ongoing therapy, the thin, emotional line that separates him from another suicide attempt.

It’s the necessary human-contact among family, friends and the people he meets, including those who have survived their own suicide scares, along with the self-awareness of knowing he remains mentally-ill and must be forever vigilant of any sign of relapse.

In 2005, I wrote a story about for the LA Times. That piece launched a lifetime friendship. Since then, I’ve seen him grow up. I know his Dad Patrick and attended his wedding to wife, soulmate and chief supporter, Margaret.

I love them both and respect the way they walk this treacherous tightrope of mental illness.

Still, all these years later, Kevin has a complex relationship with the Golden Gate Bridge: He’s drawn to the span, while loathing what it stands for.

Kevin’s story of survival is very timely, because suicide in America is on the rise.

A recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report states that between 1999 and 2017, suicide rates in the U.S. rose to their highest level since World War II. The increase can be found among women and men, and in every racial and ethnic group.

In 2017, some 47,173 Americans chose suicide, but only a tiny few settled on such an over-romanticized and very public exit as a fatal tumble from the Golden Gate. Since the bridge’s completion in 1936, some 99% of an estimated 2,000 jumpers who catapulted themselves over the four-foot-high security rail have perished.

Two decades later, the monolithic bridge still holds sway over Kevin’s life.

On the first anniversary of his suicide try, Patrick brought him back to the site of his jump. Shaking with dread and vertigo, Kevin dropped a purple tulip plucked from a nearby flower bed, watching it cascade down to the currents below.

He has devoted his life to telling not just his story, but that of others.

His documentary champions the families of those who didn’t make it, as they describe the devastating personal baggage left behind after a loved one’s suicide.

He has turned his fury into a campaign for public good — fighting a public perception that building an anti-suicide net on the Golden Gate Bridge would ruin the span’s spectacular beauty and that determined jumpers would only go elsewhere. 

In 2014, after Kevin helped lead years of activism, bridge officials approved a $200 million net to be completed in 2021. Kevin is making a film to probe the decades of backroom politics that continued even as people continued to jump to their deaths.

But Kevin remains vulnerable to his disease, and he knows it.

In all, he’s been confined at nine different psychiatric wards. His met Margaret during one stay; she thought he was a charming orderly, not a patient. 

In person, he’s a boyish, freckle-faced athlete who has honed his stage presence as a public speaker and in producing 320 popular Youtube “vlogs” — in which he offers intimate glimpses into his continuing daily struggles.

In 2018, Kevin had a nervous reaction to his anti-psychotic and mood-stabilizing drugs and doctors stopped all medications. He suddenly knew answers to all the problems of the universe. He fought off metallic spiders, was visited by Jesus Christ, Gandhi, Aboriginal elders and the King of Bhutan.

Exercise helped. Margaret — lovely Margaret! — would order him to “Drop and give me 50 pushups,” dispatch him to the gym or to take a long hot shower while she stood watching, like a wife, a parent, a therapist, a best friend.

Months later, Kevin quit all his medications without telling anyone. He went manic, hiring a limo on New York for a three-state jaunt, interviewing people in nonsensical segments for his mental health vlog, footage that offers a front-row seat into his disease’s frightening state of mind.

Such episodes have tested Margaret’s mental health as well.

“Sometimes, I’d scream ‘I can’t stand to look at your face anymore! Get the fuck away from me.” She’d take a walk to decompress, deep-breathe, and talk to the sprit of her late mother.

Yet she remains a counter-weight to Kevin’s madness, mentally strong where he is weak. She allows him to cry in her arms.

Nowadays, when he travels on speaking engagements, Kevin still approaches airport TSA guards and airline personnel for help with his panic attacks. 

Or he calls Margaret.

“I’m in trouble,” he’ll say.

He's fought off demons during speeches. “I know one of you is going to kill me today,” he tells audiences. “But before you do, I’m going to give one hell of a talk.”

After another day on the talk circuit, Kevin is clueless of the next day’s plans. 

Those come at 4 a.m., delivered by Margaret, to keep him focused on the moment. It’s a way to believe that just maybe, what Kevin Hines doesn’t know cannot hurt him.

“I’m still not normal,” he says. “I never will be.”

So let me tell you more about Kevin’s latest project, the My Brother’s Keeper podcasts.

The interviews were captured 18 months before the murder of George Floyd but each episode features people of color talking frankly about American inequality and injustice. 

There’s a black writer and cancer survivor who launched a business to help the disadvantaged create resumes that will get them jobs, an Atlanta comedian and entrepreneur who has carved out success, even in Donald Trump’s America, and a Georgia crisis counselor who deals with young African Americans and suicide.

As I watch the opening sequence to each episode I realize just how far Kevin has come since he took that fateful leap two decades ago.

There’s a series of panning shots as Kevin walks through an airport, with his voiceover:

“My name is Kevin Hines and in the year 2000 I nearly died by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. I was depressed. I was terribly suicidal and I thought I was a burden to my family. This was the furthest thing from the truth. I am beautiful and so are you. Life is the greatest gift we’ve ever been given. So live it with me and be here tomorrow and every single day after that.”

In the end, the camera swirls around for a closeup. Our host wears his game face, which suddenly breaks into a warm, genuine Kevin-like smile.

It captures the light and darkness of one of my best friends.

Yo go, Kev.

Be here tomorrow. I’m expecting to see you.