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February 3, 2004 -- A man despondent over losing a bet on the Super Bowl jumped from the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge Sunday night - and survived the 10-story leap after landing on grassy ground padded with snow, law-enforcement sources said yesterday.
Adrian Matthew Conde, 25, fell 115 feet from the Bronx ramp of the bridge, landing on the ground about 60 feet short of the East River.
Had he hit the ground 10 feet away in either direction, he could have been battered on boulders at the edge of the shore, officials said.
He was in "critical but stable condition" yesterday at Jacobi Hospital, a spokeswoman said.
Shortly after 11 p.m. Sunday night, MTA Bridges and Tunnels personnel spotted a car parked in a right lane of the bridge and began searching below for a possible jumper.
Cops then found Conde in Ferry Point Park beneath the bridge lying in six inches to one foot of icy snow.
"He was laying on his back, moaning," said Emergency Medical Technician Jennifer Ferraro, who responded to the scene with partner Justin Lim.
Conde, wearing a jacket and jeans, said "no comprehensible words" but "was moving around" and appeared to have head injuries.
"His right pupil was non-reactive. There was no obvious broken bones. And he had minor scrapes on his legs and pain in his right abdomen," Ferraro said.
"Everybody was pretty amazed about that, for sure," she said. "You see a lot of things. It was one of the crazier ones."
Conde, of The Bronx, had a history of psychiatric and gambling problems, a police source said.
Other sources said it was not known how much money he bet on the matchup between the Patriots and the Panthers or whom the bet was with.
On Sunday night he left Queens and headed for The Bronx in his girlfriend's 1994 Isuzu station wagon, cops said.
The bridge has two towers - tall steel structures from which the suspension cables hang and bear the weight of the roadway, and two anchorages, where the suspension cables are held fast to the ground.
Conde, driving at an hour when traffic was very light, stopped the car halfway between the tower and anchorage on the Bronx side.
He would have had to climb over a side wall about 3 to 4 feet high before plunging about 115 feet, said MTA Bridges and Tunnels spokesman Frank Pasqual.
Personnel saw "a stopped vehicle and there's no driver and so obviously two things come to mind," he said. "Either a person abandoned it and walked off the bridge or could have jumped."
Last year the MTA completed a capital project in which 15-feet-high steel trusses, installed alongside the bridge's roadway in 1946 to stiffen the bridge's resistance to wind, were removed.
The open trusses would not have been a deterrent to a jumper, Pasqual said.
"They had no preventive capability. Someone could have stepped right through," he said.
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Email Archives
Print Reprint
February 3, 2004 -- A man despondent over losing a bet on the Super Bowl jumped from the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge Sunday night - and survived the 10-story leap after landing on grassy ground padded with snow, law-enforcement sources said yesterday.
Adrian Matthew Conde, 25, fell 115 feet from the Bronx ramp of the bridge, landing on the ground about 60 feet short of the East River.
Had he hit the ground 10 feet away in either direction, he could have been battered on boulders at the edge of the shore, officials said.
He was in "critical but stable condition" yesterday at Jacobi Hospital, a spokeswoman said.
Shortly after 11 p.m. Sunday night, MTA Bridges and Tunnels personnel spotted a car parked in a right lane of the bridge and began searching below for a possible jumper.
Cops then found Conde in Ferry Point Park beneath the bridge lying in six inches to one foot of icy snow.
"He was laying on his back, moaning," said Emergency Medical Technician Jennifer Ferraro, who responded to the scene with partner Justin Lim.
Conde, wearing a jacket and jeans, said "no comprehensible words" but "was moving around" and appeared to have head injuries.
"His right pupil was non-reactive. There was no obvious broken bones. And he had minor scrapes on his legs and pain in his right abdomen," Ferraro said.
"Everybody was pretty amazed about that, for sure," she said. "You see a lot of things. It was one of the crazier ones."
Conde, of The Bronx, had a history of psychiatric and gambling problems, a police source said.
Other sources said it was not known how much money he bet on the matchup between the Patriots and the Panthers or whom the bet was with.
On Sunday night he left Queens and headed for The Bronx in his girlfriend's 1994 Isuzu station wagon, cops said.
The bridge has two towers - tall steel structures from which the suspension cables hang and bear the weight of the roadway, and two anchorages, where the suspension cables are held fast to the ground.
Conde, driving at an hour when traffic was very light, stopped the car halfway between the tower and anchorage on the Bronx side.
He would have had to climb over a side wall about 3 to 4 feet high before plunging about 115 feet, said MTA Bridges and Tunnels spokesman Frank Pasqual.
Personnel saw "a stopped vehicle and there's no driver and so obviously two things come to mind," he said. "Either a person abandoned it and walked off the bridge or could have jumped."
Last year the MTA completed a capital project in which 15-feet-high steel trusses, installed alongside the bridge's roadway in 1946 to stiffen the bridge's resistance to wind, were removed.
The open trusses would not have been a deterrent to a jumper, Pasqual said.
"They had no preventive capability. Someone could have stepped right through," he said.
