Petaluma man reunites with man he saved from suicide

Retired CHP Officer Kevin Briggs and the man whose life he helped save, Kevin Berthia, arrived Friday at the Golden Gate Bridge’s north vista point in gray daylight, the wind slapping, fog slowly climbing the bridge towers.

Tourists crowded the viewpoint. From there was visible the point just south of the north tower where, on March 11, 2005, Berthia climbed over the rail to kill himself. Briggs, called to the scene, had spoken with him - really, he mostly listened - for 92 minutes before Berthia climbed back to safety.

Now 33 and in many ways a different man, Berthia said Friday was, in its externalities, very much like that day 10 years ago. The wind. The cast of the light. The fog. The tourists.

But it was the first time he had returned to the vista point since he had driven there a decade ago, at the age of 22, sucked down by despair.

“I parked here and saw how far I had to walk,” he said of his arrival Friday.

“It takes a lot out of me to come here,” he said as Briggs, a Petaluma resident promoting his memoir, “Guardian of the Golden Gate,” was interviewed a distance away.

“But it is needed,” Berthia went on, “because it is a fear, putting myself back in a bad place. But it’s for a much better cause.”

Both men are full-time activists for suicide awareness and prevention, and Friday’s event was part and parcel of the work they do year-round, speaking at events around the country, often together, sharing their joint and separate stories, and trying to reach people who may be suicidal and their families.

It is his passion, said Briggs, who wrestles his own depression, for which he takes medication, and whose son, when he was 13, starting cutting himself and speaking of suicide.

“It destroys families,” Briggs said. “And it can cause other suicides.”

The new book recounts Briggs’ experiences bringing 200 would-be jumpers back from the brink. He is in contact with very few of the people who chose life over death with him at their side - let alone good friends with them, as he is with Berthia.

But when Berthia embraced the cause of suicide prevention, it took him into Briggs’ circles, and the pair are now close. Still, though they have shared the separate parts of their joint story at speaking events, they have never talked in private about what happened that day.

“We’ve never discussed it on a personal level,” Berthia said. “We leave it there. It’s something that happened.”

A San Francisco Chronicle photograph of their 2005 encounter shows Berthia perched on a narrow pipe outside the guardrail, his head pressed into the steel slats, at least one hand stuck in his pocket.

“I think the wind,” Berthia said about what kept him from simply falling. “It pressed against me.”

As he spoke, visitors snapped photographs. A bride and groom dressed in wedding finery walked by.

“It wasn’t about my agenda,” Briggs said of his approach that day, “but just to listen to him.”

Berthia, who said he was diagnosed at age 19 with a congenital depressive condition, said Friday he had never dealt with the things that drove him to the bridge rail that day: the deaths of loved ones, a divorce, the stresses of fatherhood, the loss of a job.

He told them to Briggs.

“Once I got all those things out that were crushing me on the inside, it gave me much more strength,” he said. “I left that day with a lot more than I came with.”

About 1,400 people are known to have committed suicide by jumping from the bridge since it opened in 1937. Only about 24 people who attempted suicide from the span are thought to have survived.

The Golden Gate Bridge’s board of directors authorized a suicide net in 2014 that is expected to be installed over the next three to four years at a cost of $76 million, most of it in federal funds.

Briggs has come around to support the idea.

“I liked the beautiful view,” he said. But a conversation with a man whose daughter had jumped to her death from the Golden Gate convinced him, he said.

“He said, ‘Kevin, what would you choose, a view or a life?’ He swayed me right there,” Briggs said.

Briggs is to speak and read from his book at the Novato Costco, 300 Vintage Way, on Saturday from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.

You can reach Staff Writer Jeremy Hay at 521-5212 or jeremy.hay@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @jeremyhay