Commuters' mood turns ugly as suicide try snarls I-5 traffic

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlep-i.nwsource.com/local/36928_jump29.shtml

Commuters' mood turns ugly as suicide try snarls I-5 traffic

Wednesday, August 29, 2001

By GORDY HOLT, LEWIS KAMB AND VANESSA HO
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTERS

Passing motorists, Metro bus passengers and truck drivers hurled insults and urged a distraught woman to jump from her perch on the railing of the Interstate 5 Ship Canal Bridge Tuesday morning.

Police rushed to the scene to try to talk the 26-year-old Tacoma-area woman out of attempting suicide. But as the region's busiest freeway disintegrated into a massive traffic jam, the mood of some commuters grew ugly.

"People were yelling, 'Jump, bitch, jump!'" Seattle Police Department spokesman Clem Benton said. "Now who wants to hear that in this type of a situation?"

One Seattle radio station appeared to poke fun at the woman's predicament, peppering its live broadcast with splashdown sound effects.

Fearful that she would succumb to the taunts, police shut the freeway down in both directions at 8 a.m., snarling thousands of motorists for more than two hours. Traffic was backed up from Northgate to the West Seattle Bridge exit. Side streets quickly became clogged.

The woman finally jumped, taking a 160-foot plunge into Lake Union.

Surprisingly, she survived the equivalent of a fall from a 16-story building. Last night, she was listed in serious condition at Harborview Medical Center.

Yesterday's mob ugliness seemed to have further tarnished Seattle's image as a polite, mellow metropolis, causing some to wonder if the Emerald City is getting meaner.

Historians and psychologists drew no conclusions, but pointed to a mainstream culture increasingly inured to violence and crisis. And they said people who cling to the notion that Seattle is somehow "kinder and gentler" than other cities are self-deluded.

"This town is not immune to mob psychosis and violence. You go back to lynchings, anti-Chinese riots, anti-radical riots, race riots," said historian Walt Crowley, executive director of HistoryLink.org, an online encyclopedia of local history.

Still, he called yesterday's crowd "a rare display of mass incivility."

Police were alerted to the drama about 6:20 a.m. when commuters first noticed the woman sitting on the railing on the bridge's southbound side. A car was parked in the emergency lane nearby.

She sat facing out, her heels propped on a section of round conduit shackled to the pavement's vertical side.

During hours of tense negotiations yesterday, specially trained officers talked to the woman. Included were at least four hostage negotiators and three officers from the department's Crisis Intervention Team.

"The first thing (officers) will do in this type of situation is ask, 'What can we do for you? Can we call anyone who can help you?'" Benton said. "We try to take the time to work with people and assist them in any way we can."

After talking to the woman, officers asked that one of her friends be brought to the scene. A short time later, Washington State Patrol troopers escorted a South Seattle man to the bridge.

"We've had a lot of success in these kinds of situations," Benton said.

This time, the strategy failed. Shortly after 10 a.m. the woman stood a final time, then stepped into thin air.

She tumbled several times in a fall that seemed to take forever, but lasted only a few seconds. She smacked the water hard, just south of the channel's midpoint -- a few dozen yards from the Pocock Rowing Center dock.

It was the first jump off the Ship Canal Bridge this year, authorities said.

"She kind of just cannonballed," said Holly Viola of Seattle, who was caught in the traffic jam. "She came up and she was swinging her arms, trying to swim."

Harbor Patrol divers were in the water within seconds. She was pulled aboard one of three waiting police boats and delivered to medics.

A Harborview Medical Center spokeswoman said the woman, whose name was not released, was conscious last night, with chest and abdominal injuries.

KUBE-FM shock jock Rob Tepper, who hosts the morning "T-Man Show," made light of the situation in his repartee with call-in listeners and in-studio colleagues.

KUBE general manager Alison Hesse defended Tepper yesterday, saying, "The station did not encourage listeners to heckle (the woman) or participate in anyway."

Tepper said later that he didn't encourage the woman to take her own life.

"I was shocked to learn people were telling her to jump," he said.

Had he known what people were saying, he said, he would have called them "idiots" on the air.

Asked about the sound effects, he said: "It was a 'kerplunk.' I'm not claiming this is the most sensitive show in the world. Absolutely not."

Police were taken aback by the anger flashed by the crowd, but said only a fraction of the commuters reacted that way.

The people who yelled at the woman are unable to relate to another person "as a human being," said Eric Trupin, vice chairman and professor in the University of Washington Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.

"If this was a relative or your loved one, you could never conceive of doing something like that," he said. "It's so troubling that the response of motorists and citizens would be so unkind and non-empathic ... treating it like a sporting event."

Seattle may have a reputation for niceness, but it's not immune to big-city problems.

"It could have happened in New York. It could have happened in Tokyo," said Geoffrey Loftus, a UW psychology professor who co-wrote "Places Rated Almanac," which compared cities on different levels.

Basically, it could have happened in any city large enough to have a group of vocal, "extreme" people, he said.

The difference between here and New York City, for example, is the amount of attention given to the crowd's meanness.

"New York is so vast that an incident like that is a little more lost in the noise of everyday events...," Loftus said. "It would barely make Page 18 of The New York Times."

Crowley pointed to popular culture as a possible culprit."I don't know if it's peculiar to Seattle, but certainly our music, our TV, our films, our literature are saturated with selfishness and gratuitous violence and exploitation," he said.

"I won't get political on you, but we're not living in times that value empathy, or a sense of community."

One reader who learned about the incident on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Web site yesterday wanted to send the woman a card.

"She needs to know everyone doesn't feel like the jerks on the bus," the reader said.

Sgt. L.J. Eddy of the Crisis Intervention Team said it is not uncommon for people to urge someone threatening suicide in a public place to go through with it.

"Almost any time there's an opportunity for the public to yell, they'll do it," said Eddy, who was on the bridge yesterday.

"It's not the majority of people, but there's always one or two who seem to do it."

© 1998-2001 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

********************

Exploiting woman's plight for ratings

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlep-i.nwsource.com/jamieson/37062_robert30.shtml

Exploiting woman's plight for ratings

Thursday, August 30, 2001

By ROBERT L. JAMIESON JR.
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

Suddenly, T-Man sounds so mortal.

Speaking on the phone, the Superman-ly voice of KUBE's anything-goes morning radio show was not hurling one-liners faster than a speeding bullet.

Nor was he steamrolling folks with jokes more powerful than a locomotive.

T-Man -- aka Rob Tepper -- seemed earthbound. So human.

Perhaps this is what happens after you take a suicidal woman on a bridge and turn her into fodder for your top-rated FM radio show that is popular among commuters.

Then, that woman jumps.

Kerplunk!

Ha! Ha! Ha!

A real knee slapper.

Much of T-Man's program Tuesday was devoted to the unfolding drama of the 26-year-old woman whose plight stopped rush-hour traffic.

On air, T-Man praised Seattle police for patiently trying to talk the woman down from the Ship Canal Bridge. He pleaded for the woman to consider the shortsightedness of jumping.

But, ultimately, T-Man's "best" intentions were overshadowed by the show's sophomoric impulses -- asinine antics that were likely heard by the cretins who drove past the woman and yelled, "Jump ... bitch ... jump!"

"We do what we do," sighed T-Man, who is 31. "People don't tune us in for hard-hitting news stories. They tune us in for our personalities."

He's right. And very wrong.

People do listen for the wild and woolly antics that have turned T-Man's show into a hit. This week, for instance, he and his in-studio cabal dialed up women and left offensive messages on their voice mail. T-Man also skewers politicians, roasts the rich and infamous, and pontificates on love and sex, often using racy language.

Call him an Equal Opportunity Shock Jock -- Seattle's own Howard Stern.

But the last thing the 26-year-old woman -- emotionally fragile, lonely and fed up -- needed was someone to make light of her predicament.

T-Man pounced on the bridge drama, venturing to the place he said he would not tread -- "hard-hitting" stories, the province of serious news reporters.

T-Man told me the story was his opportunity to provide a public service.

"We were talking on-air about what were some of the reasons for the traffic backup," he said. "We were doing our part. Our way is different."

Indeed.

On the air, T-Man offered the suicidal woman tickets to next year's Summer Jam concert. If the woman could somehow hear about the tickets -- perhaps, from some passing motorist who was not insulting her? -- then she could realize the preciousness of life, T-Man figured.

But the budding newsman failed his crucial on-air test because he could not check his unctuous, bad-boy self. Remember his own words: People "tune us in for our personalities."

Personality -- with too little personal responsibility -- is what listeners got.

One of T-Man's in-studio buddies joked on air about having "a crazy Asian" ex-girlfriend -- a none-too-veiled suggestion about the mental state of the woman on the bridge, who is of Asian heritage. T-Man later said he never meant to cast aspersions.

"But you don't think that a woman going up to the side of the bridge has got to be a little crazy?" he asked me later, when we spoke.

Above all, one thing T-Man did on the show was unforgivable: He aired the sound effect of some object hitting the water.

"It was a kerplunk," T-Man confirmed. "I'm not claiming this is the most sensitive show in the world. ... Absolutely not."

It was more than insensitive. It was reckless. Low.

Simply put, T-Man moonwalked over the line of good taste.

Radio shenanigans work when hosts poke fun at politicians who are more crooked than question marks or tease philandering athletes who have so many kids that they lose track.

Throwing out barbs in a matter of life and death? That's not funny business.

T-Man's charge is to entertain. His employer, equally culpable in the bout of insensitivity, pays him for it. Audiences lap it up.

"He's just doing his show and entertaining people. ... He does not want to deal with the other stuff," an executive producer of T-Man's show told me.

Sure, T-Man did not encourage the woman to jump or prompt his listeners. But his radio antics, no matter how much they are sweetened by humor, offer public validation to the inner Neanderthal that lurks inside some listeners.

It's comedy at the expense of social conscience.

On Tuesday, KUBE could have used the real Rob Tepper, the smart, introspective person with whom I spoke. He should have toned down the show, spoke about the traffic jam and earnestly discussed suicide. Instead, we got T-Man, who milked the woman's plight for ratings.

"If anything, I was trying to be as sympathetic as possible," countered T-Man, who said he was stunned to hear what motorists had yelled to the woman.

"I think we showed atypical sensitivity," he added.

We should be thankful the woman survived the 160-foot plunge to the water. She faces a long road, and could use our love and support.

As for T-Man, I wonder how he would have felt if the woman had been his girlfriend? Or mother?

Would he have giggled? Or would he have done what I will do the next time he pollutes my boom box: Tune out.

© 1998-2001 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

-- Cherri (jessam6@home.com), August 31, 2001

Answers

*SIGN OF THE TIMES* and it,s gonna get uglier,read the =prophecy!!!

-- al-d. (dogs@zianet.com), September 01, 2001.

p.s. calling women bitches,is not-cool! every woman ,is someone's MOM,WIFE OR SIS.

america's values are in the toilet. and pretty soon the FLUSH will happen.

-- al-d. (dogs@zianet.com), September 01, 2001.

Al, no flush. The system is self-correcting.

-- helen (federation@is.at.hand), September 01, 2001.

Brings new meaning to the phrase:

"If someone told you to jump off a bridge would you?".

How many times did I hear that growing up.

Sadly the same thing happened here not that long ago, but the individual did not jump.

Al, so right you are at times :-)

-- Sumer (I@aint.sayin), September 01, 2001.

America,, such a kind land...

-- Will (righthere@home.now), September 01, 2001.

p.s. calling women bitches,is not-cool! every woman ,is someone's MOM,WIFE OR SIS.

Not necessarily. Every woman is somebody's daughter.

-- (Roland@hatemail.com), September 01, 2001.

Bit selfish of her though, wasn't it? Suppose it was your grandmother in an ambulance that was being held up in the traffic? There's too many people who desperately want to stay alive and can't, for me to have any sympathy with attention-seeking nutjobs.

-- dave q (scrape100@hotmail.com), September 01, 2001.

It is time to realize that we are Human BEINGS not Human DOINGS. Too many people having too many places to go in too little time.

Too bad.

-- FutureShock (gray@matter.think), September 02, 2001.