WHY I WAS 1 1/2 hours late getting home yesterday from work-
they should have pushed him...................
Would-be jumper rescued from TZ Bridge
By GREG CLARY
gclary@thejournalnews.comTHE JOURNAL NEWS
(Original publication: April 26, 2005)
A 40-year-old Orange County man, possibly distraught that he might be banned from seeing his girlfriend's children, spent nearly three hours 200 feet above the Hudson River, threatening to jump from the Tappan Zee Bridge as police closed down traffic below.
Armondo Chico of 21 Private Lane, Middletown, finally opted not to take his own life after state police negotiators calmed him during two hours of cell-phone and face-to-face conversations.
A mobile response team that had arrived an hour earlier by helicopter guided Chico down one of the superstructure's spines, to the applause and whistles of hundreds of onlookers.
State police officials would not say specifically what was bothering Chico, but said one possibility was that he would not be allowed to see the children of his girlfriend.
"What he was despondent about turned out not to be true," said Capt. Evelyn Mallard, the head of the state police at Tarrytown.
Chico was convicted in September of second-degree rape of a 13-year-old girl. Mallard said she couldn't confirm that his status as a Level 3 sex offender — considered a high risk to the community as a repeat offender — played into the suicide threat.
Chico, a 5-foot-2-inch, 120-pound man with a receding hairline and close-cropped beard and mustache declined to comment as he was being handcuffed to go to Westchester Medical Center for a psychiatric evaluation.
Family members who arrived at the state police barracks in Tarrytown also declined to comment.
Police said he could not be charged with trespass or disorderly conduct, at least until he could be evaluated by doctors.
State police confirmed Chico had driven with his grown daughter and her boyfriend from Rockland to just past the center span of the 3-mile bridge, under its superstructure, pulled over in the southbound lane, gotten out and told his daughter to leave him.
Chico didn't tell her what he was doing, Mallard said.
The young woman called 911 soon after her father left the car, about the same time Thruway workers saw him climb over a fence and ascend the steel structure, crossing over to its northern side.
At least once during the next few hours, Chico went almost to the top of the structure, about 200 feet above the pavement and 300 feet above the river. He moved close to the edge numerous times, witnesses said.
From about 2:30 p.m. until nearly 5:30 p.m., traffic remained at a standstill through the busy corridor, which routinely handles 135,000 cars and trucks a day.
With the main Hudson River crossing in the northern suburbs completely closed, traffic backed up on feeder roads in Rockland and Westchester, as much as 10 miles in each direction on the main roads feeding onto the bridge.
Traffic as far away as Hartford, Conn., was rerouted via message signs, but those caught on the bridge could do little but wait.
"There's always something on this bridge, road work or something," said Sean Powell of the Bronx, a 1986 graduate of Nyack High School who commutes to his job at Wyeth five days a weeks.
"That's why the people at my job are probably scratching their heads," he said.
"I'm always calling with something going on at the bridge," he said.
Powell was caught in the four-hour delay caused in June 2003 when a distraught father climbed the bridge and threatened to jump off during the morning rush hour. Workers and state police persuaded him to come down.
"I picked the wrong time again," he said.
As it became clear to drivers they would have to wait for a while, many got out of their cars to watch the "police action," as the New York State Thruway's advisory radio was calling it, some with binoculars.
By about 5:20 p.m., Chico and the negotiators were climbing down the ladder from one of the bridge's upper edges.
Not 20 minutes earlier, before it was clear Chico would give up, police had taken the unusual action of backing traffic off the Rockland-bound side and sending cars and trucks onto Route 9 in Tarrytown through the Thruway maintenance garage parking lot.
Westchester-bound traffic was allowed to come through in the left lane only, and police already had closed off access to the bridge at Exit 11 in Nyack.
By 5:30, traffic was going in both directions, with horns honking and drivers smiling, despite reports that travel time over the bridge from Rockland after it was reopened was more than an hour and a half because of the backups.
