Man Pushes 'Jumper' off Bridge in China

BBC News is reporting that a 66 year old man in Guangzhou, China, pushed a man off a bridge ledge where he had been threatening to jump for the past five hours.

Chen Fuchao was despondent over the $293 000 US debt he had incurred from a failed construction project, and planned to end it all at Haizhu bridge, a relatively new bridge in Guangzhou, a city in Southern China. By the time Lai Jiansheng, 66, had intervened, traffic had been stopped on the bridge for over five hours, as emergency crews tried to talk Chen down from the ledge. Lai, a retired soldier, had tried to intervene sometime previously, but police would not let him through. He then broke through the police cordon and climbed the bridge to where Chen was standing. Appearing sympathetic, he greeted Mr. Chen with a handshake and seemed to even caress his arm- and then pushed the man into a partially-inflated safety cushion below the bridge, turning around and saluting the crowd. Chen fell eight metres and is recovering from elbow and spine injuries in Guangzhou hospital. Lai justified his actions by calling Mr. Chen "selfish", claiming that many people who make public suicide attempts really have no intention of following through with the action, but are instead trying to draw government attention to their problems, at the expense of public convenience. Haizhou Bridge was completed in April, and has already seen twelve potential jumpers, all of whom held up traffic for several hours, and none of whom actually jumped in the end.