WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. – West Palm Beach police shared a 911 call Monday after a 57-year-old woman fell from a drawbridge and was later saved by a boater.
On April 2, just before 8:30 p.m., at the Royal Park Bridge, someone called 911. This was 23 minutes after the woman was thought to have fallen.
The person who called police said, “I need the Coast Guard down here at the Okeechobee Bridge and Intracoastal. A girl fell through the bridge with her bike when it was open, and she’s stuck up under this ledge.”
The person who made the call later told police, “I’m trying to get her. I’m trying to get her out from under the bridge so that she doesn’t get killed if it opens again. But she is under the part of the bridge that opens.”
Police said that a boater from Hawthorne, 53, heard the woman asking for help a few minutes later and came to her aid. He took her to a nearby marina, where paramedics met them.
The woman wasn’t hurt too badly.
“In an initial statement, the woman said she was walking her bike from west to east on the north side of the bridge near the pedestrian walkway when the bridge started to open when she was about three feet from the pedestrian warning gate,” said West Palm Beach police spokesperson Mike Jachles. “Detectives think that the woman fell between six and ten feet to one of the landings under the bridge.”
Police said that they found the woman’s bike and talked to her. They also talked to her workplace, FDI, and the Florida Department of Transportation.
They said they will talk to the woman again to “clarify” what she said the first time.
