To reach a suicide prevention hotline, call or text 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org.
A woman whose son died by suicide by jumping from the Penobscot Narrows Bridge in 2013 said that surviving families feel re-traumatized every time someone else dies the same way, as just happened a few days ago.
Stephanie Cossette of Eddington said that when state officials decided last year to install suicide prevention fencing on the bridge, she was worried that delays in the project could lead to other deaths.
Then this past weekend, another person died by suicide when they jumped from the bridge. Cossette, who is 62, said her 93-year-old mother called her about it.
“She called me crying,” Cossette said. “She heard about it before I did.”
This past summer, the Maine Department of Transportation said that it was delaying the project, which the Legislature had approved in June 2023, so that it could conduct tests to determine if strong winds could damage the proposed fencing or even the bridge itself. Those tests would push back the project to early 2025, and possibly farther if the testing showed that the proposed fence design needed to be changed, state officials said.
Paul Merrill, spokesperson for Maine DOT, said Monday in a brief statement that the department is still waiting for the final report from the wind testing lab to determine what impact the fencing might have on the bridge structure. He did not provide further comment.
Cossette said she has been upset that that state still has not installed the fencing yet, but now she is starting to feel more “ticked off” than upset.
“This is exactly what I’ve been worried about,” Cossette said. “I’m afraid it’s never going to get done, and it will be one excuse after another.”
Every time someone else dies by jumping from the bridge, it is not just that person’s family who suffers, she said. Friends and family of previous people who have jumped are re-traumatized, she said, and the first responders who are sent to search for and possibly recover their bodies run the risk of harming their mental health.
Cossette said that although critics claim the $2 million project won’t save lives and that people who want to die by suicide will just do it somewhere else, research shows this is not true.
Studies have shown the the urge to commit suicide is impulsive, and often people who cannot immediately find the means to end their lives change their minds and do not try again. Other studies indicate that people who tried to die by jumping from great heights, but who survived, said they regretted the decision as soon as they began to fall.
“My son was very impulsive,” Cossette said.
Had there been fencing on the bridge in 2013, her son may have turned back, and Cossette and her family likely would have had more time to get him help.
“We could have done something more,” she said.
Roughly a dozen people are believed to have died of suicide by jumping from the Penobscot Narrows Bridge since it was completed in 2006, and others died before then by jumping from the bridge that preceded it, the Waldo-Hancock Bridge. Conversely, there have been no suicides at the Memorial Bridge over the Kennebec River in Augusta since fencing was installed there in 1983, according to suicide prevention advocates.
In 2015 the state installed suicide hotline phones at either ends of the Penobscot Narrows Bridge, in the towns of Verona Island and Prospect, but more than once the phones were found to be not working. Mental health advocates have said that the phones have not proven to be effective, even when they have been functional.
In 2014 and again in 2017 , legislators rejected the idea of putting up preventative fencing on the bridge, saying the cost would be expensive.
