A man was on life support at a Long Beach hospital after jumping off the Belmont Pier into the ocean Sunday wearing a backpack filled with sand, according to police.
Lifeguards responding to a possible suicide call threw a buoy into the area of the water where the unidentified man was last seen, rescue boats arrived there and divers pulled the poor soul out of the ocean just after 12:10 p.m.
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“Were it not for the capabilities of the Public Safety Dive Team, it is likely this man would not have been located as quickly,” Long Beach Police Sgt. David Marander reportedly told City News Service.
The dive team is a partnership of the lifeguards, Long Beach Police and Long Beach Fire.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.