On December 7, 1994, Howard Stern received one of the oddest on-air calls of his decades-long radio career. “I don’t know if this is real or not, but there’s some guy on the phone…he’s got a cellular phone with him, and he’s about to jump from the George Washington Bridge and kill himself,” Stern told his listeners at around 8:10 a.m. that morning. However, as soon as the man was patched in, he made it clear to Stern that he wasn’t kidding.
After verifying the caller’s claim by getting one of his listeners on the bridge to honk in the background, Stern asked the man why he was killing himself. “Cuz life sucks sometimes, you know?” he responded. As Stern and co-host Robin Quivers kept questioning the caller, his phone briefly cut out, prompting Stern to quip, “I guess he jumped.” The man then clarified that his battery was running low, adding, “and so am I.”
Eventually, a woman who’d been listening from her car pulled over and got on the phone with Stern. “Howard, I heard you talking. I’m a passerby; he’s serious,” she explained. No one else knew then that the woman on the other end of the phone had grabbed the guy and held on as Stern did his best to cheer him up. Shortly thereafter, the police arrived, and Stern bid the man farewell by saying, “Let me thank you for calling in. I’ve always wanted to help someone who was about to jump from a bridge.”
Howard Stern Once Prevented a Man From Committing Suicide Live on the Radio
Stern later held a press conference to discuss the situation, which the female passerby also attended. “Who better to help someone who is psychologically disturbed than Howard Stern, who himself is psychologically disturbed?” Stern joked to reporters. The mystery caller was identified as 29-year-old Emilio Bonilla from the Bronx. Bonilla was charged with cocaine possession and reckless endangerment, and was taken to Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center for psychiatric evaluation.
You can check out Bonilla’s exchange with Stern, along with Stern’s press conference, in the video below.
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