GILL — With two suspected suicide jumper incidents at the French King Bridge in the past two weeks alone, local officials and law enforcement have found themselves once again asking a familiar question: where are the cameras?
Gathered around a picnic table near the bridge while a helicopter searched overhead Wednesday, awaiting the arrival of a bloodhound search team, officers from Erving and Gill and detectives from the Massachusetts State Police told The Recorder that installing security cameras to monitor the 140-foot bridge itself — the site of numerous suicides over the years — and the nearby parking lot where a suspicious unattended vehicle had been found around 1 p.m. could solve a wide array of problems.
Those could include quickening response times if someone does jump or appears likely to do so — possibly preventing it — and keeping emergency responders safe to giving the suspected victim’s family peace of mind in knowing what happened to their loved one.
It could also save a lot of the money spent to conduct expensive searches by air, boat and land by showing immediately whether someone actually jumped, or simply wandered into the nearby trail system for a hike.
“Erving has someone on the desk from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday,” said Gill Police Chief David Hastings. “If we wired the camera into Erving, she could be actively looking at that and maybe see the car, ID the situation right away. The worst case scenario is having to wind back a DVD and look at it.”
Sgt. Christopher Redmond of the Gill Police Department said he’s personally responded to at least 20 suspected jumper calls at the bridge in his three decades in law enforcement.
Redmond was the one who noticed an unattended Toyota Prius parked in the lot earlier this month that set off a weeks-long manhunt for Tyler Hagmeier, the man suspected of having murdered a Quincy College professor Vibeke Rasmussen in Plymouth. Neither Hagmeier nor his body have been found yet. There hasn’t been any sign of the unidentified suspected jumper from Wednesday, said Hastings.
“Confirm or deny, that’s all we need,” Redmond said of the camera proposal.
Hastings said having cameras to review whether Hagmeier jumped would have also helped put the community’s mind at ease by reassuring them that a wanted murder suspect wasn’t hiding in one of the cabins along the riverbank or wandering around town. Instead, residents were instructed to remain vigilant and lock their doors and windows at night.
One of the state police detectives on scene Wednesday told The Recorder that it’s difficult to measure exactly how much each search costs, since there are so many agencies involved, but one incident in recent years has been estimated to have cost between $10,000 and $12,000.
Hastings said Gill and Erving’s selectmen have held a number of meetings with each other, state representatives and officials from the Massachusetts Department of Transportation in recent years, but little has come of that yet.
“The meetings just kind of stopped,” he said.
Gill Selectman Randy Crochier, who’s been pushing for years for a camera system, said Thursday that those meetings were organized by former state Rep. Denise Andrews around 2013, but slowed down after she left office. He said current Rep. Susannah Whipps Lee recently assured him that she’d get the ball rolling on the situation again.
Crochier said he recently received a prototype system design from MassDOT, but said the cameras need to be higher resolution and run more often than the ones presented to provide any real utility.
“What we need to see (the victim) get out of the car, walk down bridge and see the final result so we know if we need men in the water or not,” he said, recounting an incident a few years back where a person parked their car, walked halfway across the bridge, got into another car and drove away, leaving footprints behind in the snow.
MassDOT officials did not immediately return requests for comment on the situation by press time Friday.
“There’s a major cost, and I’m hoping to prevent an even larger cost in loss of life,” Crochier said. “The Hagmeier incident was a perfect example of that.”
Crochier said searches for possible jumpers also endanger the lives of the divers who have to look for them, especially in the winter.
Redmond said the idea of putting nets under the bridge to catch jumpers has been pitched, too, but that would present new risks to the emergency responders, requiring a police officer to be trained to perform the rescue in case the victim presented a danger to others as well as themselves.
“It’s amazing that it’s taken this long. Cameras seem to be the easiest way, and no one has come up with a good reason not to do it,” said Hastings, the Gill chief. “I can’t believe that would be more costly to do than what we’re spending, and the lives put at risk with our divers in the water.”
As for the search on Wednesday, Hastings said the incident is still under investigation, but the suspected jumper’s family came and picked up their car. Divers plan to search for a body on Tuesday, when the river’s flow will be slow enough to allow them to safely enter the water.
You can reach Tom Relihan at:
trelihan@recorder.com
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