We need to feel loved

Lt. Mike Hotz of the Nashville Metro Polilce responded to a bridge in that city on July 23. A man was standing on the edge, literally and figuratively.

“Stay back,” the man told him. “Don’t come any closer.”

Hotz, a 16-year police veteran, knew that the man was livestreaming on social media and planned to make a spectacle of his suicide.

“I was the first vehicle that arrived,” Hotz told The Washington Post. “I just stopped and got out and attempted to speak to him.”

He knows how to relate to people in crisis, having served as a leader on his department's crisis negotiation team. He spent 45 minutes talking to the man while other officers stopped traffic in both lanes on the bridge.

He told the Post, “It was emotional. This was an individual who had reached a level of frustration where he was having the worst day of his life. I just wanted to be able to develop trust with him and help him realize that tomorrow is another day and it will get better.”

And after a while, after a patient rapport-building, the man began to open his feelings. “It was a combination of life circumstances that happened that brought him to a level of ultimate frustration and desperation,” Hotz said.

Still, the man leaned over several times, and Hotz remained worried about what might happen.

Hotz served two terms in the Army, and while the man on the bridge was not a veteran, the stories Hotz shared about his service days seemed to help the man feel less alone.

“I just let him know that we love him and we are there to help him and he wasn’t in any kind of trouble,” Hotz said.

Having built a level of trust, Hotz eventually walked up to the man and extended his hand...

“He stepped forward from the bridge and he just kept walking toward me while I had my hand extended, and I could tell he was going to go in for a hug,” Hotz said. “He just kind of broke down.”

Hotz's bodycam footage shows the man weeping in the lieutenant's arms as Hotz told him he loved him.

“This guy needed to know that people cared about him,” Hotz said. “When I was thinking about how to communicate with this individual, that is what I felt, and it is what I meant.”

In a way, love built a bridge to save a man on a bridge.