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"Four days after his father, Charles Gallagher, Sr., a successful businessman, jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, his son [Charles Gallagher, Jr.] followed him. The younger Gallagher, 24, was a premed student at UCLA. He drove his father's car to the bridge and jumped from nearly the identical spot. His suicide note was short: "I am sorry… I want to keep Dad company." 4
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"John Thomas Doyle, 49, of San Francisco died leaving a suicide note that read, 'Absolutely no reason except I have a toothache.'" 5Aug. 12, 1958
"Eilert Johnson, 70, of Oakland, held a hat on his head with both hands the whole way down as if he was afraid it would blow away." 6July 23, 1964
"Leonard Jenkins, "… a 45-year-old airplane mechanic jumped with his four-year-old son." 7Oct. 4, 1976
"When Diane Hansen, 30, of Sausalito jumped from the bridge, it was two weeks after her mother died and was cremated. As Hansen fell, narrowly missing a harbor Queen cruise ship filled with tourists, she held on to a ten-by-ten-inch white box that contained her mother's ashes." 8Oct. 1, 1977
The first double suicide belongs to an uncle and his niece, who were said to be kissing each other “time after time” before they turned “their backs to the bay and, holding hands, tumbled backwards off the Golden Gate Bridge to their deaths.”Dec. 3, 1980
One bridge victim who does not appear in The Final Leap is Robert Byther, 27, because his body was unrecovered and his death was never officially recorded as a bridge suicide. Byther, a Navy veteran, had traveled from Virginia to San Francisco with the intent of protesting the election of Ronald Reagan by jumping from the Golden Gate. A short article about his jump appeared in the December 5 edition of the Spokane Spokesman-Review.

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Sarah Birnbaum, 18, the only person who is known to have survived a jump from the bridge and returned, only to die on a second attempt.Jan. 28, 1993
The first known murder-suicide, a man going through a divorce threw his three-year-old daughter over the rail before jumping in after her. Earlier in the day the man had murdered his wife.Nov. 25, 1993
"Filomeno De La Cruz, 33, celebrated Thanksgiving with relatives… then walked his two-year-old son along the bridge. Around 5 PM, De La Cruz lifted the child from his stroller, grasped him in his arms and jumped over the guardrail. 'He was going through a divorce and custody fight,' a homicide inspector said at the time." 9Apr. 24, 1998
Christine Bepp, 51, and Vanessa Chapman, 22, "two women … who did not know each other ended up at the same spot on the bridge at the same time with the same intention of killing themselves. They sat on the chord, on the other side of the railing, talking to each other. A Bridge Patrol officer noticed them and tried to talk them back to safety; instead, one woman stood up and stepped backward off the bridge. The other woman then followed her." 10Sept. 15, 2005
Milton Van Sant, 85, the oldest person to jump from the bridge.The story of a man who took his own life, attributed to Dr. Jerome Motto, a psychiatrist from UCSF, and dated only as being in the 1970s, is particularly haunting. "'The guy was in his 30s,' Motto related, 'lived alone. Pretty bare apartment. He'd written a note and left it on his bureau. It said, 'I'm going to walk to the bridge. If one person smiles at me on the way, I won't jump.'" 11
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1. John Bateson, The Final Leap, p. 9, University of California Press, 2012.
2. Ibid, p. 82.
3. Ibid, p. 84.
4. Ibid, p. 75.
5. Ibid, p. 81.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid, p. 83.
8. Ibid, p. 80.
9. Edward Guthmann, "Lethal Beauty / The Allure: Beauty and an easy route to death have long made the Golden Gate Bridge a magnet for suicides," The San Francisco Chronicle, October 30, 2005.
10. Bateson, ibid, p. 81.
11. Ibid, pp. 140-141.
12. Ibid, p. 200.
13. As quoted in "Suicides From the Bridge," http://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Suicides_from_the_Bridge
14. Bateson, ibid, p. 102. Here he is quoting from Allen Brown, Golden Gate: Biography of a Bridge, Doubleday, 1965.
15. Ibid, p. 23.
16. Jeff Stryker, "Ideas & Trends; An Awful Milestone for the Golden Gate Bridge," The New York Times, July 9, 1995.
17. Bateson, ibid, p. 82.
18. Eloise Harper, "Teen Girl Survives Fall From San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge," ABC News, San Francisco, April 18, 2011.Previously - Royal Trux Ruined My Life