Jumper (suicide)

A jumper, in police and media parlance, is a person who plans to fall or jump (or already has fallen or jumped) from a potentially deadly height, sometimes with the intention to commit suicide, at other times to escape conditions inside (e.g. a burning building).

The term includes all persons who jump, regardless of motivation or consequences. That is, it includes persons making sincere suicide attempts, those making parasuicidal gestures, and those attempting to escape conditions that they perceive as posing greater risk than would the fall from a jump, and it applies whether or not the fall is fatal. Survivors of falls from hazardous heights are often left with major injuries and permanent disabilities from the impact-related injuries. A frequent scenario is that the jumper will sit on an elevated highway or building-ledge as police attempt to talk them down. Observers sometimes encourage potential jumpers to jump, an effect known as "suicide baiting".

The term was brought to prominence even more so in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, in which approximately 200 people at the point of impact or trapped above the point of impact in the North and South towers of the World Trade Center jumped to escape the fire and the smoke caused by the direct impact of Flights 11 and 175. Many of these jumpers were inadvertently captured on both television and amateur footage, even though television networks reporting on the tragedy attempted to avoid showing the jumpers falling to avoid upsetting viewers.

Songs which incorporate jumping as their main theme include:

As of 2002, the highest documented suicide jump was by expert skydiver Charles "Nish" Bruce, who killed himself by leaping without a parachute from an airplane, at an altitude of over 5,000 feet (1,500 m).

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