Advocates Cheer Bridge Fencing

Suicide barriers planned for Bear Mountain
Lorraine Lein once again found herself standing on the Bear Mountain Bridge on June 30.
On that day in 2023, she visited the bridge with her son, Jake Simmons. On the same day last year, she carried a picture of the teenager framed in cardboard and a bouquet of flowers that she wired to one of the bridge's rails. On the cardboard, she wrote two dates: May 1, 2006, the day of Jake's birth, and June 30, 2023, the day he jumped from the bridge.
By the end of 2028, Lein should have something to celebrate at the bridge: the installation of mesh fencing that advocates believe would have prevented the deaths of Jake and other people who have used the Bear Mountain and Newburgh-Beacon bridges, and three other spans owned by the New York State Bridge Authority, to take their own lives.
The fencing is part of a $93.8 million contract NYSBA approved last month for the redecking of the Bear Mountain Bridge. When Gov. Kathy Hochul announced the project on Feb. 25, her press release mentioned the fencing but not the lobbying by Lein and groups like the American Foundation for the Prevention of Suicide.
Lein brought an urn with Jake's ashes to a NYSBA board meeting in 2024. She also described June 30, 2023: driving Jake, 17 years old and distraught over a girlfriend's infidelity, to Bear Mountain State Park for a mood-elevating hike; Jake fleeing after they arrived; police cars speeding to the Bear Mountain Bridge; begging an officer blocking her path to give her access to where Jake jumped.
NYSBA said on Feb. 25 that the fencing "marks an important milestone" in its "longstanding commitment to public safety and mental health awareness." Lein said she is "ecstatic" about the barriers, but "sad that it took so much pressure and so long and so many people to die" before the authority agreed to install fencing.
Now the goal, she said, is to get barriers installed at the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge and NYSBA's three other Hudson River spans, the Kingston-Rhinecliff, Mid-Hudson and Rip Van Winkle bridges. "It will stop people from dying," said Lein.

On the day Jake jumped, NYSBA's bridges were outfitted with emergency phones, security cameras that were monitored at an around-the-clock command center and security guards. The agency also required that bridge workers be trained in preventing suicides.
Despite those measures, people continue to jump. Alongside Jake's image, Lein wrote "24 more deaths, 6/23-6/25" in reference to the number of suicides on NYSBA bridges since Jake's.
Sean Gerow, who chairs the Hudson Valley/Westchester County chapter of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and is associate executive director for the Mental Health Association in Orange County, said he has trained "probably 90 percent" of NYSBA's bridge workers in suicide prevention.
Those workers have prevented people from jumping, but fencing "is probably the biggest thing that we can do to save lives as well," he said.
Clare Redden's master's thesis at Teachers College, Columbia University, argued for barriers on NYSBA bridges, drawing inspiration from an actual incident. While rowing in the Hudson River in 2022, Redden encountered a 19-year-old man who had jumped from the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge.
As he clung to the tip of her rowboat, said Redden, he kept repeating: "I don't know what happened, I don't know what happened; I think I jumped."
Redden, who is AFSP's advocacy chair, cites a study from the 1970s in which a researcher tracked people who had been prevented from jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco; he found that only 10 percent went on to kill themselves, belying an argument that people will just find another way if prevented from jumping.
"It's a big deal," she said of fencing. "Short of a gun, a bridge is the second-most-lethal means for suicide, and reducing access to the utilization of that means prevents that suicide from occurring."
NYSBA operates on tolls collected at its bridges. In Ma...