John Kevin Hines’ birth parents were poor, troubled people who had their baby taken away by social service officers after they left him alone in a flophouse room. He was 9 months old when Pat and Debbie Hines took him home with them. They were native San Franciscans who had known each other since elementary school. As time passed, Pat prospered as a banker, and he and Debbie adopted two other children. They had a nice home west of Twin Peaks, and a smaller place at Clear Lake.
When Kevin was 10, he had an attack of epilepsy and was put on a medication called Tegretol, which seemed to work. Kevin was a sensitive boy who wore his emotions on his sleeve and loved acting. He had freckles and short hair, and his fingers were delicate and expressive. But he was also tough and determined. Despite having asthma, he was on the Riordan High School wrestling team, and played nose tackle on the football team.
When Kevin was 16, two things happened to change an apparently happy boy into something else. Pat left Debbie. And because Kevin had suffered no more epileptic episodes, he was taken off Tegretol. “Very shortly,” says Pat, “Kevin went down Alice’s hole.” What none of them knew was that Tegretol also suppressed those frighteningly dramatic mood swings symptomatic of bipolar disorder. Kevin had a breakdown while onstage in a school play. He seemed altogether different, in need of psychiatric help and cocktails of medications to stabilize his mood swings and ameliorate his paranoia. “He was never the same after that,” says Debbie.
After a furious fight with his mother, Kevin moved in with Pat in January 2000. Father and son also butted heads. Kevin was often irritable and hard to control. He was rocked by the suicide of his drama teacher. His depressive cycles seemed to come at regular intervals, and Thursdays and Fridays were usually worst. On Friday, Sept. 22, Kevin’s girlfriend broke up with him.
All weekend he had hallucinations and heard voices. He didn’t tell Pat, though he remembers saying: “I don’t want to be here anymore,” and his dad’s replying: “You have an obligation to be here. We love you.” That was on Sunday, and he spent the night in his room writing suicide letters and throwing them away. On his seventh try, he got it right. A good suicide note. Monday morning a worried Pat offered to bring Kevin to work with him, or take the day off so they could go to the movies. But Kevin said he was fine, he wanted to go to classes.
“I was actually very happy that morning,” Kevin says now, five years later. “Elated. I was going to end the pain.” He persuaded Pat to drop him at City College on Ocean Avenue. He kissed his father goodbye and gave him a rare hug because he thought it was going to be the last time he saw his dad.
He went to Walgreens for his last meal -- Skittles and Starbursts. Then he boarded a 28-19th Avenue bus headed for the Golden Gate Bridge. He was sitting in the rear when it hit him: “I’m actually going to do this. I’m going to die today.” That made him a little sad. But the voices persisted: “You must die! You can’t go back! You are a burden to those who love you!” He wanted to end his life by leaping off the bridge because he thought a gunshot or an overdose of pills would hurt too much. He had heard that jumping was the easiest way to die. The ride seemed long.
When Kevin disembarked, he stood for a while in the parking lot. Then he walked out onto the span, looking for a good spot to jump, where he wouldn’t hit a pillar on the way down. The sun was breaking through the fog, creating a hazy, golden light. He was crying as he walked. A female police officer on a bicycle passed him without stopping, and then two bridge workers in buggies. Kevin’s voices were insistent now: “You have to die!” He thought if only somebody would show he or she cared, he wouldn’t jump. Just then, he was approached by a glamorous woman wearing huge sunglasses. “It’s OK!” he thought. “She cares.”
The woman held out a camera and in a German accent asked him to take her picture. She ignored his tears. When she walked away, Kevin turned, took three running steps, and plunged toward the green, calm water.
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At the very moment Kevin Hines launched himself over the guardrail and plummeted toward the water below, he changed his mind: “Oh s--,” he thought. “I don’t want to die! What am I going to do?”
He plunged headfirst, gaining velocity until he was speeding far faster than the traffic above him crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. The distance from bridge to water is the equivalent of 25 stories, and he was conscious the whole way. The descent passed quickly, as if he were flying. Yet in mid-fall he was strong enough to turn his body into a sitting position, so he hit feet first. He sank beneath the calm, frigid water. Deeper and deeper. Far scarier than the screamingly silent fall was the darkness beneath the surface of the bay. The deeper he sank, the darker it became.
The pain was indescribable. The impact had broken his back and shattered vertebrae. And then he began, with the instinct for survival of any animal, to swim upward toward light and air. When he broke through the surface of the water he was stunned to be alive, and momentarily thought he was hallucinating. He tried to swim toward a bridge pylon, but his pain overwhelmed him and he began to sink beneath the water again, struggling against dying. He managed to bring his head above water when he felt something -- something alive, a creature -- brush his legs.
“I didn’t die,” he thought, “and now I’m going to be eaten by a shark.” The creature kept circling him, nudging him, preventing him from sinking back into horrifying darkness. He was aware of the echo of traffic, and car horns. Then he heard a boat motor. All of a sudden, hands were grabbing him, hauling him up, laying him on a board. A man in uniform -- it was the Coast Guard that rescued him -- was asking questions.
“What did you do?”
“I jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to kill myself.” He was 19.
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Debbie Hines, a public health nurse, was in a class on “Understanding Depression” on Sept. 25, 2000, when she received a call on her cell phone that her eldest son was in Marin General Hospital after surviving a leap from the bridge. Then she was driving and crying and praying: “Please, God, don’t let him be like Christopher Reeve.” When she reached Kevin, he was still on the board the Coast Guard had brought him in on. He looked crumpled but managed to say, “Hey, Ma. Hi.”
She helped the other nurses lift him onto a hospital bed. She said to him, “Kevin, I don’t know what it is, but God has you here for a reason.”
Kevin’s father, Pat, also arrived alone. He and Debbie had been separated for about two years, after 18 years of marriage. Pat didn’t begin to lose it until his son looked up at him and said, “I’m sorry.” When he remembers that moment now, Pat, a private banker who prides himself on having come up from poverty and being nobody’s fool, sighs deeply. On the drive to the hospital he kept thinking that Kevin was dead and the hospital wasn’t telling him.
His memories of what happened next are blurred. There was a machine monitoring Kevin’s heartbeat, and he knows he touched his son’s foot and felt no reflexive reaction. Hours later, a nurse said to him, “You have to go.” Pat answered: “I’m staying.”
For three weeks, he slept on a cot in Kevin’s hospital room. One thing he does remember is that the next day, or the day after, a nurse asked for his help -- another boy had jumped and survived, and she thought he might have been a friend of Kevin’s, one of the kids who came and stood forlornly around the waiting room. It wasn’t. The boy was a stranger. The nurses knew that among the more than 1,200 who had jumped from the bridge, only 26 are believed to have survived. They began to joke among themselves in the morbid way trauma workers have of sustaining themselves. “The survival rate for jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge,” they said while laughing, “is 100 percent.” And for those two days it was.
Doctors screwed a metal plate into Kevin to replace his shattered vertebrae. But Kevin was having a terrible time -- not just physically but emotionally. He was tormented, hallucinating. Soon he was moved to a psychiatric ward at St. Francis Hospital in San Francisco. It was months before he was released.
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Kevin, Pat and Debbie have all been changed by what Kevin did. “Going through the experience of a suicide and coming out the other side alters a family,” says Eve Meyer, the executive director of San Francisco Suicide Prevention. “Some families can become angry, especially if they had no warning -- he left the house in the morning and bang! And if you’d known, you’d have done something -- you become very, very angry. Furious.”
On a recent morning, Kevin was sitting on a sofa in his dad’s living room, telling his story. He is now a compactly built young man of 24, with gentle, dark eyes and a thin reddish beard shaved to follow his jawline. He is polite, accommodating and articulate. Five years after jumping off the bridge, he still has flashbacks. He sees himself plummeting toward his death and his body shakes violently. Last May, he cut into his right shoulder with a box cutter and was hospitalized for two months. Since then, he has lived in a psychiatric residential care facility. But he likes to come to his dad’s small townhouse to read and watch TV. He calls it his sanctuary.
Kevin takes eight pills at night -- mood stabilizers, antidepressants, another to control side effects -- and one antipsychotic every morning. He is acting in independent films made by friends and has found a direction in life as an advocate for a suicide barrier to be built on the Golden Gate Bridge. During the first 18 months of his recuperation, he kept his story to himself. But a conversation with a priest helped convince Kevin that his survival was a gift he was meant to share. He does not consider himself to be religious so much as spiritual. He believes in God.
The sea creature that saved his life by circling beneath him -- he says it was a seal -- he now thinks of as an angel. Its appearance in the frigid water is not something he has talked about in public, although he has often appeared on television and been interviewed by reporters. He has never even told his mother.
When she was asked about the sea creature that saved her son’s life, Debbie was taken aback. “I think that’s made up,” she said. “I never heard about it until today. It’s either miraculous or imaginary.”
About that, as about most things, Kevin’s parents remain in conflict. Pat, who has joined his son in advocating for a barrier, says a man on the bridge that day photographed Kevin being circled by a sea lion -- not a seal. But the pictures were so painful to look at, Pat says, he put them away and now can’t find them.
The differing memories are to be expected, says Meyer, of Suicide Prevention. “A trauma like this happens and then memories get all slippery,” she says. “Nobody can remember from moment to moment what did happen.”
In his Montgomery Street office, Pat keeps a framed poster of the bridge facing his desk. “Helps you focus,” he says.
Pat says that statistics, combined with the footage filmed last year by Eric Steel of 19 people taking their lives, “have provided irrefutable data that at least one person a week” is jumping. “It’s morally reprehensible that the walkway isn’t closed,” he says. No matter the cost, he wants a barrier erected.
He supports his son’s advocacy role as therapeutic. “Surviving, and having the ability to talk about it, gave Kevin a reason for life. In many ways, this issue validates his existence.”
Debbie Hines isn’t so sure that’s a good thing. In the immaculate living room of her home, Debbie, who has never spoken publicly about Kevin, says: “Initially, I thought it was probably a good thing. But I also said to Kevin, ‘You’ve gotten to this point and done some good things. But it’s time to move on. I wouldn’t want you to make a career out of it. Because if you jumped off the bridge at 19, and are still talking about it at 45, and that’s all you’re doing, I’m not thinking that’s a great success.’”
She is opposed to a barrier. As a nurse specializing in kids at risk, she thinks the money would be better spent on treating mental illness. “When you’re hearing voices, you’re psychotic,” she says. “You have a chemical imbalance in your brain. All bets are off. You’re not going to fix that with a barrier.” Kevin’s advocacy, she adds, “got him a tremendous amount of attention, which is what Kevin needs.”
Kevin, though, feels he has found his mission. He recently changed his major to communication.
“I was at an awards banquet,” he says, “and this gentleman asked me to sign an enormous picture of the Golden Gate Bridge. He said, ‘You saved my life. I was going to kill myself before I heard you make a speech.’ I do it for that, not to get attention. To help other people. If I could take it all back, I wouldn’t. The places I’ve gone, the people I’ve helped, I’d have never met. I had heard that this was the easiest way to die, almost serene. It’s not like that -- you have a heart attack on the way down, or your limbs fall off and you drown in your own blood. And this cause I’m trying to fight for, I wouldn’t have had a reason to fight for.”
