08.20.01, hank, st. pete.: I was driving over the crest of the skyway yesterday as the sun was setting, there was an SUV parked in the right lane. Something was strange, when I got past the SUV my girlfriend grabbed my arm, I looked out the window, and there was a man standing on the 3ft wall. I looked away. Then as I was driving away I looked in my rearview mirror and saw him seem to lose his balance, bend his knees slightly, and then step off. That's my suicide story. (thanks, hank.)

08.20.01, John, Clearwater: I was driving over the Bridge last night on my way home from Palm Beach and I actually saw a man who was talking to a police oficer standing on the wall in a Black T Shirt. Well when the police officer turned his head to talk into his shoulder microphone, the guy jumped. I could not believe it. I witnessed a jump. There was so much cargo ship traffic I am amazed the stupid bastard did not land on top of one of them. There was actually one going under at the time and two ready to go under to get out of Tampa Bay. It is an honor to say that I actually saw someone jump. I know I am sick but I can live with that. (thanks, john.)

06.01.01, ©Bradenton Herald, A Palm Harbor man, who survived a 200-foot jump from the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, remained hospitalized in critical condition Thursday, according to Florida Highway Patrol Lt. Sterling King. Hannis F. Jones, 35, jumped off the bridge Wednesday, suffering multiple rib fractures, internal bleeding and injuries to his left lung, according to reports. The impact caused Jones' clothes to rip off, according to reports. Despite his injuries, Jones managed to swim about 40 yards to rocks. He pulled himself out of the water. Authorities said Jones is the sixth person known to have survived the 200-foot drop, according to the Associated Press.

06.01.01, © St. Petersburg Times, Jump survivor had struggled with depression; TODD WRIGHT; 
   Hanns F. Jones, who survived jumping off the Sunshine Skyway bridge on Wednesday, had been visibly depressed about problems with his girlfriend just a few days earlier, a friend said. Jones, 35, was in intensive care Thursday at Bayfront Medical Center after suffering rib and lung injuries. 
   "He was real upset. All he talked about is how he was under a lot of stress because he was about to break up with his girlfriend," said Jose Llano, who Jones stayed with Monday night. Llano, a Tampa resident, said the last time he saw Jones was around 1 p.m. Tuesday when he drove off in a 1972 Ford pickup. 
   Florida Highway Patrol officer Gerald Triplett reported that same pickup was found abandoned on the bridge a few feet from where Jones jumped. On the truck's dashboard, Triplett found Jones' wallet and a Father's Day card that had the words, "Love, Your Son," on the inside. 
   Jones dropped nearly 200 feet from the center of the bridge before crashing into the water and swimming 40 yards to some rocks attached to a support pillar. Jones, an inventor, was in business with Viable Products L.C. in Tampa. In 1999, he received a patent from the U.S. Patent Office for an invention called the Sock Locker, designed to keep pairs of socks together while being washed. He sold the idea to Viable Products. 
   Jeffrey Gitto, a business associate of Jones, said he was unsuccessful in attempts to reach Jones over the past two months. "Hanns was very conscious about what people thought of him or his ideas," said Gitto, who has known Jones for six years. 
   According to Llano, Jones had been staying with him off and on for the last six months and had recently gotten a job as a part-time bathroom valet at Mons Venus, a nude-dance club in Tampa. Llano said girlfriend troubles often brought Jones to his home. "As far as I know, he had no where else to go," said Llano. 

06.12.01, © St. Petersburg Times, By TODD WRIGHT, Leap from Skyway changes his life:
"I was just happy to be alive," says a man who survived a 200-foot suicide jump into the water. To Hanns Jones, his 200-foot freefall from the Sunshine Skyway bridge on May 30 was a scene unfolding in slow motion. At first, he felt like a bird in flight, relaxed and calm while admiring the rays cutting through the clouds. Then, as the unforgiving blue water drew nearer, Jones felt his muscles tense, bracing for a fatal impact. "Right before impact I realized that this was a bad idea," said Jones, 35. Jones crashed feet-first into the water, the force ripping his clothes from his body. He briefly lost consciousness, and he thought he was dead. As he surged to the surface, the image of his 17-month-old son, Braner, reawakened him. "I saw his eyes and I said, "There is no way I'm not going to make it to those rocks,' " Jones said. With fractured ribs and a collapsed left lung, Jones managed to swim to rocks some 40 yards away. "I was just happy to be alive. All my problems washed away in my mind," he said. When he reached the rocks, Jones could feel the intense pain from his injured ribs. He could not raise his arms above his shoulders. He only hoped that help would come. "I thought to myself, "I really did it this time,' " Jones said. Help arrived minutes later from the St. Petersburg FireDepartment and U.S. Coast Guard. Jones was rushed toBayfront Medical Center, where he remains under 24 hour supervision. The fall also ruptured his spleen and fractured a vertebra in his neck, which requires him to wear a halo for the next two months. Jones said his brush with death has helped him realize the preciousness of life and the importance of his role in the lives of his four children. "I was ashamed of myself because I don't want my kids to grow up without a father like I did," said Jones, who called the St. Petersburg Times to tell his story. "I care a hell of alot now if I live or not." Jones said it was a lack of knowledge about his father that ultimately pushed him to consider killing himself. An inventor, Jones has been looking for his father for years, but has found no information about him. A last-ditch effort toget a picture of his father turned up empty, pushing Jones into a depressed state. A Father's Day card that Jones carries around for sentimental value was found in the 1972 Ford pickup truck that he drove to the span of the bridge. Jones said matters only got worse when he and his girlfriend broke up the night before. "Without love, it's like someone pulled the plug on life," said Jones. "I didn't care whether I lived or died." Jones says financial difficulties put a further strain on the relationship with his girlfriend. All of his money and time was devoted to working on his inventions, he said. "It was like pulling teeth. As an inventor, you either make it or starve, and I was starving," said Jones, who in 1999 received a patent for an invention called the Sock Locker, designed to keep pairs of socks together while being washed. He sold the idea to Viable Products L.C. in Tampa. Jones said the combination of personal and professional difficulties took him to the top of the bridge where, in recent years, as many as a dozen people a year have jumped to their deaths. The number rose from six in 1996 to eight in1997, then to 12 in 1998 and 1999. The Skyway has the reputation of being a magnet for suicides. It's the third-deadliest bridge in the country for suicides, after San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge and San Diego's Coronado Bridge. Jones is among a rare few who survived. Records show that five people have survived their leaps since the bridge opened in 1987. Given a second chance, Jones says he will stop his search for his father and focus on being a father himself. After being released from the hospital, Jones plans to move in with his sister in Missouri, where he can try to piece things back together. His passion, however, remains inventing. "I am what I am," said Jones. "I wouldn't give up inventing for anything."

01.09.10: When Hanns Jones jumped from the Sunshine Skyway in 2001, he survived with some broken bones and internal injuries. Now he’s pushing his invention: the Electro Safety Rail. Mounted on short skyway walls, it would jolt anyone touching it. “I don’t want to be known as the guy who jumped off that bridge,” he said. “I want to be known as the guy who stops anybody else from jumping off that bridge.” [KATHLEEN FLYNN | Times]

01.09.10, tampabay.com, Jump from Sunshine Skyway opened door to a second chance
By Michael Kruse, Times Staff Writer, ST. PETERSBURG:
One early evening 8 1/2 years ago, Hanns Jones, 35, lovelorn and broke, parked his purple pickup truck at the top of the Sunshine Skyway bridge and dived 197 feet toward his almost certain death in the tropical blue of Tampa Bay.
People sometimes think that to jump off a bridge in a beautiful place is a more beautiful way to die. It's a lie.
You feel for a moment like you're floating. That moment ends. Then you're falling, survivors say, and then you're accelerating, and before you can think about how fast you're accelerating you crash into the water. You don't splash. You crash.
From the center span of the skyway, you hit the water in about 3 1/2 seconds, and by that time you're going approximately 75 mph. Your clothes are ripped off, and your innards are torn apart. You typically bleed to death on the inside, or you drown, or both.
On May 30, 2001, when Hanns hit the water shortly after 5, his spleen burst, his left lung collapsed, and he broke ribs on both sides and fractured the C7 vertebra in his neck. Under the surface, where it was no longer pretty and light, but murky and dark, his eyes opened wide.
Two Coast Guard boats went looking for a body.
Instead, they found Hanns, some 40 yards from where he had gone in, sitting on some rocks around the base of one of the bridge's concrete pillars, naked.
A rescuer looked down at him, and looked up at the bridge, and asked if he had just jumped.
He said yes.
The rescuer asked him if he was okay.
He said no.
It would be another five years before he scribbled on a piece of paper the words LIFE SAVER PROJECT.
How did Hanns get here?
He moved often when he was young: born in Texas, lived in California, Missouri, Florida. He never knew his father. His mother got divorced twice.
He's dyslexic. He dropped out in the 10th grade. He can fix a lawn mower or paint a house better than he can read or write. Job applications give him problems.
He has had jobs, here and there, over the years: sandblaster, groundskeeper, strip club bathroom man. He lived in his van for a while. He's a drinker.
His natural line of thought is the daydream.
"You know how sometimes you're watching a movie, and someone says your name, and you're like, 'What? What? What?' " he said one recent afternoon in his home in south St. Petersburg.
That, he said, is what he's like all the time.
But that's not all bad, he said: "If everybody was paying attention to the same thing, nothing would ever be invented."
Before he jumped, his biggest invention, and what he thought was going to be his big break, was a Velcro contraption that kept socks together in the washer and dryer. Go to socklocker.com. His idea. But he got pushed out by his partners and investors because they say he was hard to work with.
By the spring of '01, he had no job, no money. He had a son and a daughter in Missouri and a son in Orlando that he didn't see or support. He had a swollen face from a wicked toothache that he couldn't afford to fix.
And one night he had a fight with the woman he was living with, Chi Le, the mother of his fourth child, a son, then an infant. He put his hands around her neck and pushed her against a wall.
He spent that night in a cheap hotel in Clearwater, he said. He drove by to talk to Chi the next day, and that didn't go well at all. So he drove to the bridge. And he paid his toll.
• • •
He wanted to live as soon as he tried to die.
He swam toward the rocks, half a football field away, with a broken neck, and was picked up and taken in an ambulance to nearby Bayfront hospital.
Chi got a call from a doctor. She waited a day before she went to see Hanns.
"Too angry," she said years later.
Hanns spent a couple of weeks in the hospital. He spent a couple of months with his sister in Missouri. He wrote Chi love letters. She didn't write back. They talked some on the phone.
When he returned to Florida, they got back together, then split up, then got back together again, and eventually had a second son. They've stayed together since.
Now he's an inventor with a second chance. And his latest invention is a device he hopes will give others the same.
It came to him a couple of years back, he said, "just this explosion in my head."
It's the E.S.R. That's short for the Electro Safety Rail. It's a metal guard that would be rigged on top of the skyway's short concrete wall and shock people who pulled on it — not enough to kill them, but enough to stop them.
The sketches of his LIFE SAVER PROJECT are on hannsjones.com.
"I'm not accidentally alive," he said one evening at his home, sitting next to the rough prototype, "and it's no accident that I'm a United States inventor.
"I don't want to be known as the guy who jumped off that bridge," he added. "I want to be known as the guy who stops anybody else from jumping off that bridge."
It's a long shot.
• • •
Some bridges have suicide barriers. Most do not.
The skyway, the long, picturesque landmark that connects Pinellas and Manatee counties, is the nation's fourth-most-frequent suicide bridge. For the past decade or so, it has had surveillance cameras, red-button "crisis" phones and a state trooper who patrols the bridge at all times. In the past 10 years — essentially since those "life-saving" tactics came to be — at least 81 people have jumped (probably more, but sometimes they just disappear and are never found) and 11 lived.
Physical barriers are expensive, critics say, or ugly, or architecturally untenable. In the early '70s, authorities in San Francisco looked into different forms of barriers for the Golden Gate Bridge, including high-voltage laser beams. That was nixed because of the likelihood of possibly fatal jolts, and also just the general unseemliness of the idea.
"If I were a suicidal person," suicide expert Jerome Motto said on the phone, "I would not see that as a very compassionate way to help me.
"I am not aware," he said, "of any place in the world where an electrification process has been used."
And then there's Hanns.
• • •
He smokes a pack a day of Pall Malls. He drinks Natural Ice tall boys. The guy who works at the local drive-through beer joint knows what he wants.
He doesn't have a driver's license. He doesn't have a license because he owes child support.
Chi, whom he calls his wife although they aren't officially married, runs a company that connects landlords with low-income tenants, and Hanns helps fix up the houses.
They live in the main building of an old shotgun-style boardinghouse. It's in foreclosure.
One morning he took a smoke break from putting primer on walls and sat on the concrete stoop in front of a fixer-upper.
"I really think America's getting cheated that I'm not in a research lab somewhere, working night and day on the railing system," he said.
"Right now, I'm just stuck with my pen and my paper, scratching and pecking and drawing."
It's easy to dismiss him, and maybe with good reason, as a talker, not a doer, even an occasional ranter and raver. He sends lots of e-mails. He sends lots of Facebook messages. He talks and talks.
Sometimes he sounds like he thinks he's in a movie. He'll stand up all of a sudden. He'll get real melodramatic. He'll speak with a vaguely British accent.
Sometimes he sounds like he thinks he's in an infomercial: "You can help save lives! Go to hannsjones.com."
He's "brilliant," and he's "passionate," said Charles Gelini, one of his former Sock Locker partners — also, though, "a detriment to himself." He didn't want to take the product to market, Gelini said, just wanted to wait and wait, think and think. Never finish.
At the fixer-upper, the smoke break continued for most of the morning, and he kept saying he was supposed to be doing something.
"My imagination is boiling," he said. "There's so much left to create.
"I feel like a horse standing behind the race gates, and I can't get out."
He pounded his fist into his thigh.
It was quiet except for the breeze blowing through two tall Australian pines in the yard.
• • •
Second chances are only that. Not the first. Still just a chance.
"I thought it was a doorway to somewhere else," Hanns said of those 197 feet down. "I didn't know where.
"Now," he said, "I think it's here."
Here: He's 44 and still broke. He still drinks. He still owes child support. He has an idea, and some drawings, and a small prototype. He wrote the governor asking for his support.
"Dear Sir," he wrote. "You are a great Gov. Please Take a look at this. United States Inventor H.F. Jones. God be with you."
The response came from the Office of Citizen Services: "Inventors such as yourself form the backbone of our nation's innovative history, and the Governor is glad that you have shared your thoughts with him."
He has his two sons who live with him here. He has Chi.
Hanns says they're in love. Chi says yes, true, but she also says this: "I still want to get rid of him sometimes. No relationship is perfect. But I am very thankful he's still alive."
"When you're a kid," Hanns said, "you're raised with this mind-set that you live happily ever after. No you don't."
But imperfection, disappointment, even heartbreak — what he has come to realize is that those things aren't the same as meaninglessness. They're no reason to jump. Has he tried again? To kill himself?
"Heavens, no," he said.
It's interesting, too, to listen to him talk about God. He wrestles with it. He doesn't know what it is, but he knows that there's something larger than him or us, something that let him live.
"If you're out there in life, and if you're trying to care, it's like something cares back," he said. "If that's the God you're talking about, that's the God I'm talking about."
Add this, then, to the list of things he has: perspective.
Also hope.
When he jumped, he said, he was "a failed inventor."
The followup question was obvious if delicate: What are you now?
"I'm a success," Hanns said, "waiting to happen." (comments follow article, many of which are brutal.)

© St. Petersburg Times, published May 21, 2001, Officials identify man who jumped from bridge.
TAMPA - Authorities have identified the man who they say jumped off the highest span of the Sunshine Skyway bridge  to his death Saturday night. He is Justin Berrett, 21, of Longboat Key in Manatee County. Berrett's body, clad only in orange shorts, was pulled from the water under the bridge by a boater at 7:14 p.m. Saturday.

©Bradenton Herald, MANATEE - A body recovered from Tampa Bay on Saturday was that of a 21-year-old computer technician for the Bradenton Herald, a Hillsborough County sheriff's spokesman confirmed Sunday. The investigation into the death of Justin Berrett of Longboat Key continues pending final autopsy results, Sgt. Alan Hill said. The cause of death has not been released. A Florida Highway Patrol trooper reported finding Berrett's abandoned Dodge Durango on the center span of the Sunshine Skyway bridge about 6 p.m. Saturday. During the past two years, Berrett had made his mark as a computer technician at the Herald and his death shocked coworkers. "He was bright, full of life, just a kid who had everything going for him. He had almost a photographic memory when it came to computers. He was able to soak it all in and put it all together," said Information Systems Director Mike McNall, Berrett's mentor at the Herald. "He was way beyond his years in just dealing with technology and people. He was respected by people not only at the Herald but at Knight Ridder (the Herald's parent company). Guys at corporate would ask him questions. He was very respected by a large group of people," McNall said. Berrett was in line for a promotion, McNall said. "His knowledge far exceeded his job title and position. He was totally psyched about being promoted." Funeral arrangements were incomplete Sunday.

04.14.08, Diana B., Bradenton Fl., I have known about this site for many years but have not visited in a long time. I wish to make a few corrections regarding the death of Justin Berrett. His siter Kim left some words a year or two ago. Some of the events are not accurrate. She mentioned that I talked him off the bridge. True, it was Thursday. We spent Friday night with a group of friends. Saturday he boated and I was not a part of this like she claims. I did tell someone about what happended Thursday against Justin's wishes. Justin also told me he told his grandmother he was having suicidal thoughts. Justin told me he had an appointment with a Doctor on Monday. I did feel a sense of reposponsibility to say something. At 21 years old we are not equipped to deal with such heavy situations effectively. When Justin told me he was seeking medical help, I believed him. We had contact every single day for years and he had never lied to me. Why would I think this any different? It was just as much a shock to me as everyone else. But please don't think I sat idlely by and did nothing. When it comes down to it, if someone wants to end their life, they will find a way. (we are sure this was very traumatic for you. it was not up to you to read his mind and determine what his intentions were. he was a troubled man and in the end, he made up his mind to jump all by himself. it's apparent that many knew he was suicidal. how many of them feel like they could of done something? just what could they have done? 24 hour suicide watch? how long can that go on? even if you talked him into jumping, it still would not be your fault. the suicidal always calls the shots at self-death and only they are to blame. we wish you well.)

© St. Petersburg Times, 03.23.01, Skyway jumper identified as Fort Myers man, 78. Police have identified the man who jumped to his death from the Sunshine Skyway bridge on Tuesday as William R. Copeland, 78, of Fort Myers. Hillsborough County sheriff's investigators say Copeland parked his 1999 Dodge van on the southbound side of the Skyway's center span about 2:40 p.m. Tuesday. He left the van running with the keys in the ignition, got out and jumped.

thank you, jumpnews reporter: david z., oldsmar.

03.12.01, Bob S., Tampa, FL.: I was fishing on Skyway Fishing pier. A ton of firetrucks and cops showed up, one paramedic said there was a jumper and they were looking for the body. There was also a white Ford pickup truck parked at the top of the bridge. 

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