2 Die in Separate Falls From Bridge

In what law enforcement officials termed an eerie coincidence, two 25-year-old Coronado residents fell to their deaths at the same moment Sunday from separate locations on the San Diego-Coronado Bay Bridge.

At 2:15 a.m., Michael Thomas Reno and two younger friends were walking in a restricted area on the bridge’s maintenance catwalk when Reno lost his balance, said Coronado police spokeswoman Julia Polansky. Reno fell about 40 feet and landed on the rocks below the bridge near Pier 2.

Moments before, Coronado police officers had noticed a car stopped midway across the bridge. At 2:15 a.m., as they hurried toward the vehicle, a sailor based at the North Island Naval Air Station in Coronado hurled himself 246 feet to the water below.

The timing of the suicide and the accidental death at first aroused suspicions that they were related in some way, police Sgt. Jeff Hutchins said.

“The Reno boy was found first,” he said. “We were running around looking for a connection.”

But in a report on the sailor’s suicide filed with the San Diego County medical examiner’s office, investigator Penne Hammerstead wrote: “In spite of identical time of occurrence and proximity to each other, this case and the other are in no way related to each other.”

Hammerstead said the Harbor police pulled the sailor’s body from the bay at 2:35 a.m. He was pronounced dead on impact, and officials were withholding his name until today.

Since the bridge was built in 1969, more than 150 people have committed suicide by jumping from it. No one is known to have fallen from the catwalk before, according to Jim Larson, a spokesman for the California Department of Transportation.

Larson said transportation officials will review the circumstances surrounding Reno’s death and evaluate whether further precautions are needed on the catwalk. But he said Reno had to climb a fence to get to the point from which he fell.

In addition, Larson said, security gates on the walk keep people from traveling past a certain point. It was as Reno tried to get around one of these gates, Larson said, that he lost his balance and fell.

According to Hutchins, Reno was attempting to crawl under a support beam on the top of Pier 2. Two friends who were with him on the catwalk reported his fall, Hutchins said. Because both are juveniles, their names are being withheld.