Liam O’Donoghue has seen some wild stuff in his seven years running his East Bay Yesterday tour on a fishing boat in the San Francisco Bay, like breaching whales and crashing Jet Skis. But none compared to what happened Friday afternoon as O’Donoghue was getting ready to deliver a talk on the East Bay’s mass transit system.
“Did you see a guy in the water?” the boat’s first mate asked as O’Donoghue, who also hosts the “East Bay Yesterday” podcast, was about to take to the microphone. Instead, he grabbed his binoculars.
There he was — a man bobbing in the water on the other side of the Bay Bridge, about 200 yards behind them. Three people on the north side of the bridge screamed “Be careful” and pointed at the man.
The evening sun made the water almost blinding. Nevertheless, the boat’s 28 passengers and three crew members kept their eyes on the man. O’Donoghue told the passengers they were taking part in a rescue and instructed them to stay calm.
“Everyone did the exact right thing, like, people weren’t screaming and freaking out,” he said.
O’Donoghue was speaking to the Coast Guard over the radio as his boat pulled up alongside the man. The captain exited the cabin with a salmon net and stuck it toward the man, who grabbed it immediately.
A deckhand and passenger Simon Lion pulled the man into the boat. Lion and his girlfriend Robin Lara consoled him as he sat trembling on the deck.
“He was kind of out of it,” Lara said. “We started asking him some questions, and he was kind of cagey about his answers. He told us that he was driving alone and got tired. Then, a separate time that we asked him, he was like, ‘Oh, I had to go to the bathroom. And then I just, like, fell off the bridge.’ He kept saying he fell off the bridge.”
Lara and Lion said he appeared to be in pain and had trouble opening his eyes. The man, who did not tell them his name, said his back hurt, and he was worried he would be paralyzed. He appeared to be around 20 years old and Latino.
‘The odds of us being there at the exact right time and place are astronomically slim.’
Liam O’Donoghue
“You’re gonna have a longer recovery ahead of you,” they recall telling the man, “but you’re gonna be fine. All we need to do is get you back to shore, and there will be people there to help.”
When the boat reached the Emeryville Marina, Alameda County firefighters came onboard and took the man on a stretcher to an ambulance.
The Alameda County Fire Department, the California Highway Patrol, and the U.S. Coast Guard had no comment.
After the rescue, O’Donoghue’s tour headed back on the water.
“It was actually nice to be together for a couple of hours after that,” said O’Donoghue, “because I think everyone needed to process what just happened. We all had a lot of questions. I just couldn’t stop thinking about it.”
The next morning, he grew more curious and posted on Reddit to see if he could get any information about the man. A few commenters responded that they had heard the man jumped off the bridge.
“My friend told me about this yesterday,” wrote one user, who did not respond to a request for comment. “He saw him leaning over the edge and pulled over and asked if everything was OK. The jumper didn’t respond, so he said, ‘Hey man, you don’t wanna do this’ and the guy just looked at him then jumped.”
Now, O’Donoghue is hoping he can discover the identity of the man he rescued and speak with him again.
“There’s not a lot of boats in that area, and if we had been there five minutes earlier or five minutes later, the guy would be dead for sure,” O’Donoghue said. “The odds of us being there at the exact right time and place are astronomically slim.”
O’Donoghue hopes to tell the man and anyone who may be in a mental health crisis that “they are not alone.”
“There are people out there, including myself, who would be more than happy to listen to their problems and hopefully help them figure things out,” he said. “If I get a chance to talk to him, I’d love to just let him know: ‘Dude, if you want to talk to someone, let me know.’”
If you or somebody you know is having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Or go here for more San Francisco resources.