San Diego Appraiser prevents suicide

Man prevents suicide on Coronado Bridge By Union-Tribune 3:56 p.m., May 13, 2011 Because Bryan Knowlton’s 9 a.m. appointment in Coronado was changed to 11 a.m. Thursday, and because he always shows up early for his real estate appraisals, there was one less suicide attempt on the San Diego-Coronado Bridge. Like the hundreds of other Coronado-bound drivers, the 42-year-old Clairemont resident noticed the car pulled to the far right side of the bridge about 10:30 a.m. He also noticed the large bottle of beer and the even bigger bottle of wine sitting on the hood. And he noticed the woman leaning over the rail. “This isn’t right,” Knowlton told himself as he eased over to the side, ahead of the woman’s car. The woman, in her early 30s, said her car had broken down and she was waiting for a tow truck, but Knowlton wasn’t buying it. He offered to talk, to buy her lunch, maybe just hang out somewhere other than on the bridge. Noticing her green and orange hospital uniform, he tried to talk up nursing. She didn’t want to talk. She did want to drink the wine as fiercely as possible, observed Knowlton. As he heard the “whoop, whoop!” of emergency sirens threading through traffic, Knowlton saw panic spread across the woman’s face. She bolted for the rail. Knowlton grabbed for her and she swung the wine bottle at his head. The bottle crashed to the ground with Knowlton and the woman right behind it. Knowlton held onto her until the California Highway Patrol officers arrived. Then he went to keep his appointment. “I must have still been in shock,” he said. “Most of the (appraisal) pictures I took were kind of shaky.”