Amy Gahran: Wow. This is an incredible story. Gripping, upsetting, real. Your eyewitness account, and your attempt to be objective, like an old-school reporter, while writing about how hard it is to live with suicide, is brilliant. I'll post this on FB and pass it around, but that's not doing enough . . .  I guess nobody is doing enough  . . .

I'm wondering whether you really think the crux of the dilemma you're writing about is why didn't you "cover" the story? do you really not understand what most people around the country, and in your own town and region, are wondering why bystanders such as yourself--i.e., people who choose passively to stand by---did nothing but watch? and in your case, tweet and take pictures with your iPhone? figured it was somebody else's problem...someone else would deal with it....it was your day off...figured big daddy firemen and policemen would save the day...figured you had no moral responsibility to your fellow human to wade into that shallow water and call out to him? no one said you had to physically swim to him and carry him on your back...but you didn't even feel inclined to make contact with someone like that...to think maybe, just maybe, your voice, your encouragement, knowing someone, even a stranger, cared might help...wow. Making an active conscious choice to do nothing--not even to try--and then after the fact, even then, not to connect the dots and realize you may have saved another person's life. You may not have, but you would have known you did your best, you tried to reach out. You'll now never know. You might consider reworking your scrappy-gutsy-indy-gal-on-the-beat bio because you're not sounding much like an "itinerant troublemaker and provocateur"...more like a self-involved and passive person who witnessed someone dying, could feel her own pain for someone she knew who commited suicide, but lacked the compassionate capacity to scale that to others, and who could wonder only whether she should've sent more tweets and photos while it was going down. The answer to that question is: No, you should not feel remiss for not reporting on what was going down. However, it wouldn't be unreasonable for you to feel deeply remiss about not doing everything in your power to aid in saving the life of a suffering human being while you had the chance.

Lime Ginger: Wow, that was harsh. How about throwing another stone?

Hey "Lime Ginger": Could I have done more in the situation? Yeah, I think I said that. But Yelling on the beach would have been the absolute wrong thing to do. In an emergency situation, people yelling and causing chaos almost always makes things more dangerous.

Speaking of cowardice and asshat grandstanding: Who the hell are you to say such things to me? I notice you're speaking up under an alias that you only created to post this comment. No bio, no photo, no info, no nothing. If you're so damn concerned about speaking up in person, on the spot, to make a difference or to make a point: Would you dare spew such bile to my face?

I'll be at TechLiminal in downtown Oakland for the Oakland Local editorial meeting next Monday, June 6, at 1pm PT. You're welcome to stop by, look me in the face, and say exactly what you think.

And if you're not local, or can't make it, at least have the guts to update your profile to say who you really are. Because honestly, you seem like far more of a self-involved, pompous coward than I am.

- Amy Gahran

It takes a lot of courage to write something like this--and so well, it makes the reader's stomach queasy in sympathy. Great work.

I also find it ironic that someone would anonymously flame you about compassion for random fellow human beings. How ridiculous is that?

Thanks for baring your guts, and remember, laughter repels bullsh*t. ;)

A budget has nothing to do with being a Hero.

The woman who swim out to get the man's body, had that in her....the people who watched simply didn't.  That's regardless of who they were employed by, what uniform they wore, what type of budget got cut or anything. 

When it's time to be a hero, hero's stand up....others watch. 

Period.

Courage and heroism doesn't come in the form of budgets. There is no class that will teach the innate desire to risk one's own life to save another human's life.  

Some people have it, some people don't.

I am not typing this as if I am full of courage, I likely wouldn't have swim out to save the man myself. But when people try to mask the real issues of humanity with bureaucratic ones, it makes our situation even worse in this world. As a society, We don't value life, therefor we don't risk much of our own to save others. We've devalued life as a society over the course of time and history, this story is just the perfect example of that deterioration. 

To those that do and have, kudos to them, we need more like you. 

But there is no news article, no budget, no comments, no tweets, no iPhone photos, no Facebook shares that will create heros.

Heros create themselves by doing something heroic. 

Is it "ridiculous" to "flame another human being about compassion for random human beings?"  Why would a "random person" deserve compassion?  I'm a random person every time I walk out on the street, and I know I'm incapable of regarding you, Ms. Bertoni - also a random person, to me - as being below my moral radar, just saying...   

Does an unrevealed identity on a fundamentally public statement make someone a "self-involved pompous coward" when they suggest, as the anonymous Limeginger does, that allowing yourself the absolutely safe social role of a witness to a suicide doesn't guarantee you an automatic moral immunity?  Considering, Ms. Gahran, that you weren't motivated to do anything much at all, particularly?  Especially since nobody else was.

One of Ayn Rand's most penetrating essays in her book "The Virtue of Selfishness," evokes this exact moral situation. Ayn Rand argues, with deep clarity, how one has no "responsibility" for saving a drowning person - only a free choice of whether to act, or not, in such a situation.  And this was a suicide attempt, so if any of you, including me if I were there, were to have gone out there with him in that shallow water, we may only have driven him deeper out.  Or worse, in a physical conflict, we may have been drowned ourselves.

But why not wade out there, to a safe distance, and talk to the suicide?  What would have prevented one single person from just making the attempt to connect with him?  He would have known that at least one person cared whether he was alive or dead, even if, as I'm sure Ms. Gahran knows, as I do with my own friends' suicides, that it's very hard to prevent the consummation of someone's love-affair with death.  He probably would've done it anyway.

It's just this outrageous PASSIVITY - Limeginger's most searing complaint.  That's where the whip comes down, to quote Mr. Jagger.  Such passivity is morally inexcusable.  And you have my name and e-mail, mahoneyjw@mac.com, so there that is. 

Mahoney--you make a great point--Amy and I talked about that the other night. Did this poor man drown because he was seeking someone who cared, someone who would connect when they saw his situation? How sad. For everyone.

It takes a certain kind of arrogance to assume that the 30 plus people standing on the shore, and the rescue crews in the water, and the helicopter, are somehow made of something less than those who weren't there.  The "if I was there I would have been a hero and done....this," is so easy to have from the safety of your home.

Standing by were firefighters and police officers; two groups of people who chose risk over personal safety as a profession.  They behave selflessly for a living.  If they didn't go, I would never assume that I would have.  If the city has made inaction a policy, then the real cowardice is in the idle standing by of its citizens who are silent about the budget or say "No more taxes."

Personally, I live on the other side of the country from your city.  Our rescue professionals are well equipped and trained, and we don't have the same budget problems that Oakland does - but I do know that I wouldn't dare say a word about the directed inaction of rescue workers without first handing over an extra 20 bucks a year for training and cold water gear.

as far as budget cuts are concerned, isn't it interesting that OPD closed its investigation of the guy who had his macbook stolen--until the story got media attention--and then all of a sudden found the resources to catch the guy?

This has to be one of the worst stories I've ever read. That it was about a person who committed suicide in a city where I used to live is even more sad. That, for budgetary & liability reasons, those emergency responders stood & watched a man commit suicide is unconscionable.

I'm sure the author is a good journalist, but to be honest, I would ask you what possessed you to simply ride off into the sunset without trying to help this man?

If this is what the world has come to, I can understand why he would kill himself. We are nothing but voyeurs, consumed with self-reflection instead of an instinct to act. Sad, sad, sad.

I was shocked as I first heard this news about a team of firefighters and about seventy-five other people watched an individual die in freezing waters in San Francisco Monday. The initial responders were strictly forbidden by police to try a rescue, which was deemed too unsafe in the freezing water. Here is the proof: Man drowns while police and firefighters stand watching, newstype.com. So sad that a lost soul's life was wasted because saving him was against the rules.

I think it's really easy to imagine "what I would do if I were there" - particularly when I wasn't. Let me try though, for a moment...

Despite the fact that I know the limitations of EMS (Emergency Medical Response), I still have this automatic childlike faith in "officials" to handle these situations. If I was a bystander in this crisis situation, I would have assumed that the police and firefighters had it covered. (And that's in spite of the fact that post-Mehserle, police scare the crap out of me and seem more menacing than helpful.)

Having been in a long term relationship with an emergency responder, a fire-department medic, I would also assume that any intervention on my part would not be permissible by authorities, could result in my arrest and could possibly derail the systematic rescue that was obviously about to take place.

As a bystander, if I saw a helicopter above a man in shallow water, I would relax and believe that the crisis was over.

As Amy Gahran's co-worker, I know her to be a warm hearted, sentimental, empathic person, as well as a kick-butt reporter. I'm absolutely certain that if she'd stumbled upon this situation before first responders had arrived, she would have done her part to ensure the man's safety. And I believe that this is true for most of the bystanders.

Apart from that, I agree with the sense that it takes a certain amount of cowardice to anonymously make accusatory statements about someone else's character.

The real fault lies at the feet of officials, not budget cuts or bystanders. But assigning blame is beside the point. What solutions could prevent this from happening in the future...

Sorry to return to the dialogue, but I've felt compelled to.  Contrary to Ms. Robie's assumption that intervention on a bystander's part "would not be permissible by authorities," it seems that at least two people weren't "arrested for derailing" a possible rescue - the man on a surfboard who did, in fact go out to help, and reached out as much as he could to the suicide, and the young woman who brought his body in.  So two people did care... and were fully unopposed by "authorities."

One simple fact about the situation is that both the police and firefighters are organized paramilitarily, with a distinct chain-of-command that any member of breaks at the risk of losing their job, and/or far worse.  Orders are Orders, and without a go-ahead from above their rank, these people had to stay ashore...

Here in DC in 1982, after the crash of Air Florida Flight 90 into the icy Potomac, a Park Police helicopter and  five "volunteers," military and civilian personnel - not Following Orders - managed to save five people who would have otherwise died quickly in the very cold water.  I know how cold the Pacific is in the San Francisco Bay area, and it would have been physically inhospitable to be out there without a wet suit... but...

What remains indefensible, to me, is something far worse, and far more human. In Amanda Ripley's book, "The Unthinkable," she details how a kind of psychological paralysis can set in when a disaster strikes; a primal denial that it's really happening can block realistic attempts to energize a survival, so people sit there, or stand there, and die - or watch others die.   Something like that happened in Alameda, obviously.  And as Ms. Robie has illustrated, a great many folks on the beach had the same response to Authority she would have - not opposing it, not even inquiring of it, just assuming that Authority itself commanded reality, and a essentially conformist prudence dictated a radical moral passivity.  

This kind of passivity is a growing social phenomenon in this country. To go from the tragic to the ridiculous - only since the beginning of this year, I've noticed that, here in the Washington area, as vehicles encounter heavy traffic, they're instinctively joining the slowest-moving lane.  Why? Because it's where most people are, where a hive-mind has indicated as the "right" lane to be in, somehow.  This is new.

What kind of "solution" might prevent the slow accretion of quiet impotence in this culture - which will kill not only one suicide in Alameda but the culture's soul?  Waking up to it and not accepting it, for a start, I guess.  Otherwise I don't know.

".... nobody is doing enough."  I agree wholeheartedly, and we must work together to change this.  Crown Beach is my favorite place. I was married here, raise my kids here, drive or walk along it daily.  In my 40 years I can tell you that the best of times and yet the worst of times for me were here on this beach.  So many people come here to celebrate life -- or-- to grieve their losses.  Raymond Zack is not the first sad, lonely soul to walk into those small cold waves, and wont be the last I'm sure.  Over the years, I've pulled close friends back from the dark edge of despair right here, my teen son now does the same.  Suicides and attempts are definitely on the rise in Alameda, as elsewhere, especially among teens in crisis and people suffering divorce, home loss, or job loss. Raymond Zack's suicide was not an "isolated incident" - Alameda has had a fast growing problem with suicide attempts, especially among teens, especially at Crown Beach.  "Water rescue training" may save the next Raymond Zack, but Alameda would do well to have more friendly responders and resources for depressed people and for people in crisis before it gets to that point, responders that don't project a "by the book" attitude, but an attitude of humanity.  

In defense of the reporter..... Alameda cops and firemen standing around ANY scene in Alameda are pretty good at telling everyone around that it is "their" scene and that help is forbidden.  Passersby get the idea quickly that a perimeter is being guarded, that there is a grand "PLAN."  How is this reporter to second guess the cops and firemen?  In fact, the cops and firemen attempted to delegate the job to the coast guard, who passed on it because their copter was refueling.  If the cops told ME a suicidal man was in the bay and they were trying to figure out how to save him, and it was taking a super long time to get the job done, I'd presume they were believed he had an effective way to stab himself or them.  It is bizarre to me that anyone is blaming the passersby, who were standing clear so the professionals could do their jobs.  Are you saying that if another suicidal man is in Alameda, we should all ignore the cops and firemen and just do what we "think" is best at the moment, rather than let them follow their carefully planned orders?  This situation went terribly wrong.  Citizens clamoring to save a suicidal man that turns out to have a deadly weapon would be just as wrong.   

I wish I knew who that girl is in the main pic.

I wish I knew who that girl is in the main pic.

I know I'm resonding to lime ginger's comments rather late, but I think some important points need to be raised about cold-water rescues that relatively few people understand.  Though I am by no means an expert in water rescues and suicide prevention, I am a certified Rescue Scuba Diver--based on my training and experience, I think Amy Gahran absolutely did the right thing.

Rule #1 of rescue is: "Do not creative additional victims."  Every year people die trying to save drowning people and animals.  Rescue attempts always involve risk, but unless one is properly trained, equiped and understands the environment, one should not attempt rescue.  Nothing in Amy's article indicates that she was trained in water rescue or suicide prevention, so staying on-shore was the wise option, no matter how difficult it was emotionally.

The San Francisco Bay is cold... in the mid-60's during June.  Even wading into the bay without appropriate thermal protection for more than a few minutes is, frankly, risky.  As I can attest from experience, standing in water this cold, even with a wet suit, can lead to muscle cramping in short order.  Without someone else to assist in relieving the cramp, you can loose the ability to swim, walk or even stand effectively.  Also, hypothermia is a serious risk. Even on the hottest days of the summer here surfers wear wetsuits; Coast Guard rescue swimmers wear dry suits.  This is why it is entirely possible that the fellow who committed suicide did so in water that was shallow enough for him to stand in.  Obviously, Amy didn't grab a wetsuit when she went out for her bike ride--she wasn't properly equiped to spend significant time in the water.

Amy was new to the area and had no specific knowledge of the tides, currents, wave patterns and bottom topography.  When wading out from beaches, you can go from an area that is knee-deep to over your head in one step.  Rip currents can pull you far out from shore.  She was wise to stay on dry land.

It is sad enough that one person died on this day.  It would have been worse if there had been additional victims, no matter how well-intentioned.