On the day last month that Tim Cowell moved into his new loft in an old downtown office building, a friend warned him about the jumpers.
Every month, or so it seemed, someone jumped to his or her death from one of the old towers near the corner of 6th and Spring streets. A few weeks earlier the friend had witnessed the suicide of a man whose body landed on the pavement less than half a block behind him.
This was disturbing news, to be sure, but Cowell, a 49-year-old architect, was not dissuaded. There are, after all, so many enticing things about living in those resurrected "concrete canyons" of L.A.'s past.
Then, last Tuesday about 5 p.m., he heard a scream followed by a loud crash. When he looked out his 10th-floor window, he saw the body of a woman in the narrow parking lot between the two tall buildings across the street.
"I thought what I heard was a gunshot" before realizing it was the sound of her body hitting the concrete, he told me. Many other people in the other tall buildings around Cowell's heard it too. They rushed to their windows and to the street. Some later recounted what they had seen on blogdowntown.com.
"She wasn't breathing, had no pulse," wrote a passerby who rushed to the victim less than a minute after her fall. The writer, a former paramedic, checked for other vital signs and found none. "She died upon impact."
Another poster described coming upon the woman's body, "a vision I wish I could remove from my mind." Some commented on the victim's beauty and youth and on the other apparent suicides nearby. They wondered why the media and local officials hadn't taken notice.
"So is it the recession?" one poster asked. "Mass depression?"
Seven people have jumped to their deaths in downtown Los Angeles this year, according to Lt. Paul Vernon of the LAPD's Central Division. An eighth survived. Three of those deaths occurred within half a block of the intersection of 6th and Spring streets, near the site of the old Pacific Stock Exchange building and the heart of the city's Old Bank District. That stretch of Spring was once known "the Wall Street of the West."
There are usually about half a dozen such suicides or falling deaths each year downtown, Vernon said. The list of recent victims includes an artist, a transient, a Midwestern transplant with a history of drug abuse and a 27-year-old man who lamented his inability to find a girlfriend. The seven victims this year were white, Asian, Latino and black, and ranged in age from 22 to 74.
