Tripler staffer saves
woman from jumping

With help from others, a distraught
person is pulled in from a lanai

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Star-Bulletin staff

A distraught woman recently was prevented from jumping from a third-floor lanai at Tripler Army Medical Center by two non-medical staff members with help from others.

Sgt. 1st Class Elva Sanborn, Tripler retention counselor, noticed the woman during the 5 p.m. Catholic Mass at Tripler Chapel March 16, according to an account by Staff Sgt. Michelle J. Rowan, Tripler spokesperson.

Sanborn said the woman sat next to her 3-year-old daughter during Mass and she was crying and upset. "I reached over and gave her a hug and then I told her I'd talk to her more after Mass."

After the service, Sanborn said she suggested the woman talk to a chaplain because she seemed pretty distressed. The woman talked to a chaplain about 15 minutes, then said she felt okay and was going back to the chapel to pray.

Feeling the woman shouldn't be left alone, Sanborn decided to wait for her and offered to take her home.

As soon as the woman entered the chapel, she ran to a side door leading to an outside lanai. Sanborn chased after her. "By the time I made it outside, she had already climbed over the side of the wall," Sanborn said.

The 5-foot-2-inch counselor threw her arms around the woman's waist to keep her from falling and began yelling for help as she desperately tried to hold on to the woman.

She said she was thinking, "I just can't let her go."

Spc. Jonathon Clark, a chaplain's assistant with the Department of Ministry and Pastoral Care, heard the screams in his office and ran to the lanai.

The two were able to lift the woman back up to safety but she continued to struggle. "We tussled a little," Clark said. "She was pretty strong."

Also running to the scene were Kevin Carter and Rene Bacalso of Jacobsen Laboring Service. They were working on handicap stalls in the parking lot when they heard the screams, looked up and saw the woman outside the balcony.

The two men and an onlooker began running to the third floor to help. Carter called security on his cell phone.

The struggling woman had to be restrained by all five rescuers until security personnel arrived to take her to the Emergency Room.

Sanborn asked her husband to pick up her daughter and went to ER to stay by the woman's side until about 10 p.m. when she was admitted and sent to a ward.

"When it was happening, I really didn't take the time to let what happened sink in," she said later. "I was just concentrating on helping her. I am so glad that Spc. Clark was there because I don't know how much longer I could have held on. I was losing the battle."

Clark said he thought the next day, "What if I had been in the kitchen cleaning the coffee pots or pitchers instead of being in the office? I wouldn't have heard the screams and the woman could have died."

Sanborn doesn't usually worship at the chapel, he noted. "That's the miracle part of it. She could have been anywhere else. There was a reason she was there, and that was to save this lady's life."