High-Rise Jump Lands Chutist in Hospital--and Hot Water

“I looked up, and the parachute was only three-fourths open,” Joseph Walker said later. “I knew I was going to hit hard. Then I hit--very hard.”

Walker, 27, survived what he said was a sport jump from a high-rise building in downtown Los Angeles before dawn on Wednesday, but he paid a price: one chipped heel, one bruised heel and a compressed vertebra.

But after treatment at the Hospital of the Good Samaritan--and a long interview with Los Angeles police, who decided, for the time being at least, to overlook the incident--Walker retired to a mattress at the home of a friend in Northridge for what doctors prescribed as “a good, long bed rest.”

“I’m super, super sore,” he said from his bed of pain. “But they say I’m going to be OK.”

While there were reports that Walker made his leap from the 20-story WCT building at 1100 Wilshire Blvd., Walker said it was from another building, “about 40 stories tall.” He said he can not identify the structure because police might change their minds and such details might work against him.

Walker, a construction worker from Chandler, Ariz., said his hard landing was the result of a rare equipment malfunction, called a “line-over,” in which one of the chute’s control lines looped over the top of the canopy, drastically reducing its capacity.

He said the accident will not daunt him at all.

“I’ll do it again,” he said. “Probably start in a month or so. I’d like to do the World Trade Center (in New York) or the Sears Tower” in Chicago.

‘Base Jumps’

Walker and his friend from Northridge, Richard Stein, 22, said they and two other young men from Southern California, whom they declined to identify, went to the building about 1 a.m. to make what are known as “base jumps.”

Such jumps get their name from buildings, antennae, bridge spans and earth outcroppings--the sort of things they leap from--according to Stein.

“It’s not a wild stunt for people like us,” Walker said. “Between us, we’ve made more than 500 base jumps.”

Walker said he was scheduled to jump first, from a window on the top floor of the building, with his friends to follow if everything went well.

“You’re always slightly apprehensive,” he said. “But I made a good launch, a good, one-second free fall . . . and I experienced what felt like a normal opening shock. But when I tried to make a turn, it didn’t respond. It was a line-over.”

Walker’s friends took him, along with his parachute gear, to the hospital, where police confiscated three parachutes--at least for the time being--after interviewing the men.

No Witnesses

The official police position is that such jumps are dangerous and illegal; that Walker hasn’t been cited thus far because officers do not have any witnesses yet.

“But while they (the police) were talking to us, one of them told me he’d made a couple of jumps in the Army,” Walker said.

“He thought what I’d done was pretty neat.”