The gridlock was epic. For eight hours on Friday, Interstate 5 at Del Mar Heights Road was closed, at times in both directions, as police talked with a suicidal man perched on a bridge above the freeway. And for miles around that spot, motorists endured a massive, extended transportation nightmare t hat slowed travel around the region. Social media posts captured some of the pain. For some, nature called and there was no way to answer. Someone wrote on X that they saw a guy get out of his car to urinate on the highway. A father said his young children had to use a plastic bag as a toilet in the backseat during the long car ride. “There was no communication, no presence on the ground, and no plan to support the thousands of people who were trapped for hours,” Solana Beach resident Kristoffer Kelly said in an email. “On-ramps should have been closed immediately. Cars should have been guided off the freeway or turned around in a controlled way.” La Mesa resident Nick Durham said he and his girlfriend were headed to an office Christmas party in Irvine but gave up and turned back. It took five hours to drive 13 miles near the closure. “I cannot believe, for the life of me, that we could not find a single way to get this guy off the freeway before the ninth hour,” Durham wrote on Reddit. “Absolutely blows my mind they let one dude shut down an entire county.” A fire department ladder is raised to the man on the bridge, and an inflatable rescue cushion is placed beneath him on the freeway Friday. (Michael Ho / For The San Diego Union-Tribune) San Diego police acknowledged the trouble the incident caused for motorists but said their main goal is “to ensure the safety of everyone involved, including someone who may be looking to harm themselves.” If a similar situation occurred again, officials said they’d respond the same way. “This incident happened to occur at one of the busiest times and in a very inconvenient location for diverting traffic,” police spokesperson Cesar Jimenez said in a statement Tuesday, adding “it was a perfect storm between timing, location, and the decision of the individual involved.” San Diego police officials said they had four patrol officers who responded to the call at the bridge, while some volunteer officers assisted with traffic at freeway ramps. They said the California Highway Patrol was responsible for traffic control because the incident involved a freeway — even though much of the backup was on streets that San Diego officers patrol. When asked about CHP’s policies related to situations involving people who threaten to jump from bridges or overpasses, press officers in Sacramento suggested the Union-Tribune submit a request for public records. Local CHP officers also did not respond. A county sheriff’s spokesperson said neither San Diego police nor CHP officials requested assistance with traffic control from the North Coastal Sheriff’s Station, which provides law enforcement services to Del Mar and other North County cities. ‘Standard procedure’ The incident began shortly after 11:30 a.m. Friday when a motorist spotted the man perched on the freeway-side of fencing on the Del Mar Heights bridge and called 911. Police were sent to try to get him to safety, but he wouldn’t budge. Specially trained negotiators were summoned. For hours, two Spanish-speaking negotiators — a San Diego police detective and an FBI agent — talked with the man. He told them he was living in his car and had been fighting with his wife. San Diego Fire-Rescue Department officials blew up their agency’s rescue air cushion, a 30-by-30-foot inflatable pillow. The man standing on the overpass, however, did not jump onto the air cushion. Since 2017, the fire department has made the inflatable available to law enforcement agencies throughout San Diego County, said Assistant Fire Chief Dan Eddy. The inflatable is transported by search and rescue team members at Station No. 41 in Sorrento Valley to the active scene, deployed and then handed over to the handling agency. Firefighters set up a rescue air cushion as a man threatens to jump from the Del Mar Heights Road bridge to I-5 Friday. (Michael Ho / For The San Diego Union-Tribune) Police negotiators say their only goal is to communicate with the suicidal or agitated person and work to get them to safety, and they do not direct people to jump onto inflatables. Negotiations typically take hours. “We want to get the person off safely, that’s the main goal,” said San Diego police Lt. Dan Sayasane, who oversees a police emergency negotiation team of around 10 people, which includes representatives from the FBI and NCIS. “Get the person off safely without an incident. So we will take that time, as much time as needed, to try to do that.” Police officials said they were aware questions were being asked after Friday’s lengthy incident. “From a negotiation standpoint, this is pretty much standard procedure for us. It just so happens to be the location, I-5 at Del Mar Heights, with rush-hour traffic,” Sayasane said, noting that it was also the first day of December Nights in Balboa Park. Shortly before 8 p.m., the man finally agreed to come off the bridge. After climbing through a hole in the fencing that firefighters had cut, he was given a bottle of water and taken into custody. According to police, he was taken for a psychiatric evaluation and likely placed on a 72-hour hold. ‘Really alarming’ Daniel Kaplan, an attorney based out of Little Italy, said his drive home to Torrey Hills, a neighborhood just south of Carmel Valley, was three times longer than normal. He said he felt sympathy for the man on the freeway ledge, but also questioned how the incident was handled. “I think the first responders’ closure of the freeway without doing everything possible to mitigate the traffic jams that followed was not well thought out,” Kaplan said in an email. “The traffic made many communities and individuals vulnerable. If there had been a fire or mass casualty event, first responders would have had difficulty dealing with those events, and people stuck on the freeway had nowhere to go.” Traffic is heavily delayed on Interstate 5 Friday due to a police incident on the Del Mar Heights Road overpass. (Michael Ho / For The San Diego Union-Tribune) Some motorists tapped creative ways to get to their destination. A Saddleback College basketball player posted a TikTok video showing him and his teammates running up a freeway embankment, presumably leaving a driver behind in the gridlock. They caught an Uber, he wrote, and “we made it to the game” at Grossmont College in El Cajon. “I feel bad for these people,” said police spokesperson Jimenez. “I’d be losing my mind if I was stuck there for eight hours, too.” As the incident stretched on, some drivers knew to stay off the freeway. By the time Kari Beucke left work in Carmel Valley shortly after 4:30 p.m., she had heard “the 5 was kind of a parking lot” and took city streets instead as she headed north. She arrived at her Carlsbad home a little past 9 p.m. She said she found blocked intersections and drivers inching along. “There was such heavy traffic I would sit at a light… for six or seven rotations and not move.” She was surprised not to see any police or special traffic control measures in place. “I was just really, really shocked that there wasn’t anybody there turning off the lights and directing traffic and keeping people calm. It was really alarming.” While Beucke said she felt sympathy for the troubled man on the freeway overpass, she wondered about ripple effects. “There are a lot of people who had their own little meltdowns — maybe they lost a shift at work, maybe their kid was sitting at school for hours not getting to be picked up,” she said. Some drivers she saw were crying, while others were angry. “People were losing it… I was driving very slowly, I started looking at people’s faces. There were a lot of people going through, like, grief. You (didn’t) know how long you were going to be there. It seemed impossibly bad.” ...read more read less