In September, 19-year-old Kevin Hines took a bus to the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. He had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder two years earlier and was in the grip of a severe mental health crisis. He walked to the railing, and jumped.
The fall is 220 feet. It takes roughly four seconds. Most people who jump do not survive the impact. Of those who do, most die from drowning or hypothermia before help arrives. Less than 1% live.
The moment Kevin’s fingers left the railing, he felt instant regret. “What have I done,” he thought. “I don’t want to die.”
He hit the water at 75 miles per hour, shattering three vertebrae and breaking his back. Somehow, he surfaced. But he was badly injured, exhausted, and beginning to drown.
Then something bumped him from below.
Kevin thought it was a shark. He panicked. But the creature kept circling beneath him, nudging him upward, keeping his head above water. It didn’t stop. It didn’t leave. A witness on the bridge later told him what they had seen from above: a sea lion, circling him in a clockwise motion, bumping him gently upward, over and over, until the Coast Guard boat arrived behind him.
When the officers pulled him onto the boat, the sea lion disappeared.
Kevin survived. A surgeon who wasn’t supposed to be at the hospital that day stayed late and performed a pioneering operation on his spine, restoring his ability to walk.
He now travels the world as one of the most prominent mental health and suicide prevention advocates alive, speaking to hundreds of thousands of people about his experience and his recovery. He says that in the moments after he jumped, every single person he saw on that bridge, he wished he had talked to.
He Jumped Off the Golden Gate Bridge—Then an Unexpected Hero Kept Him Alive
