Police say two Minnesota beer deliverymen prevented a suicidal man from jumping off an interstate bridge in St. Paul by offering the man a beer.
Authorities say Jason Gable and Kwame Anderson were driving their truck last Wednesday morning when they spotted the man clinging to the outer fence of the bridge and asked him if he was OK.
“I was thinking, ‘I got to build a rapport and give him all of his demands,'” Anderson told KARE-11 News. “But first, I got to get to know him, so I asked him his name and where he was from.”
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Anderson said he recalled negotiating tactics Denzel Washington used in the movie Inside Man and tried to build a rapport with the man.
The turning point, according to Anderson, came when he asked the man if he “wanted a drink?”
“Then when he said, ‘Maybe,’ I was like, ‘Officers, keep him occupied. I will be right back,’” Anderson said. “I ran to the truck and grabbed a case of Coors Light.”
“Came back with a 12-pack and started talking to him again. I said, ‘If you come down off that ledge, this whole pack is yours.’”
Police say the man then slowly inched his way to safety.
“I talked to him for 1 Hour then finally convinced him to have a #BEER with me and vent, then he came down,” Anderson later said in a Facebook post. “Give somebody a hug, you never know who’s goin #ThruIT.”
Police arrived and closed the interstate until the man came down, who was later taken to a hospital.
— With files from the Associated Press