A suspect involved in a standoff that slowed traffic on the Bay Bridge for almost six hours overnight had attacked a woman near the Transbay Terminal a short time earlier, San Francisco police and California Highway Patrol officials said Thursday.
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The suspect climbed off the ledge of the bridge on his own by 5:30 a.m. and was taken to San Francisco General Hospital for evaluation, according to the California Highway Patrol. Three of the five lanes on the eastbound lower deck of the bridge were shut down while officers attempted to take the man into custody, said Officer Victor Ruiz, a CHP spokesman.
According to Ruiz, the man was “jogging towards cars”, screaming, and throwing traffic cones into the road.
When the man ignored CHP officers’ requests to come back onto the bridge, they notified the U.S. Coast Guard as a precaution and reached out to San Francisco police’s hostage negotiation team. “He wasn’t listening”, Ruiz told the Chron, saying that one officer tried to Tase the agitated man “but it didn’t connect”.
Officers used a Taser, but it did not stop the man, who then ran for a short distance before jumping over the bridge’s north side railing and landing on an external structure, police said.
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Officers on the bridge then received reports from the San Francisco Police Department that the man, described as being in his 20s, was a suspect in an assault that occurred at the Transbay Terminal, Ruiz said. All lanes reopened by around 5:40 a.m.
