VIDEO – DON’T DROP HOPE –
March 9, 2023 – In 2018, Hines told his story to ABC News, recalling the feeling he had the moment that he jumped. “Instant regret, powerful, overwhelming,” he remembers feeling. “As I fell, all I wanted to do was reach back to the rail, but it was gone. The thoughts in those four seconds, it was ‘What have I just done? I don’t want to die.’”
Luckily for Hines, he turned around in mid-air and hit the water in a seated position. While he shattered three vertebrae in the fall, he was still alive. While he soon surfaced, it’s no surprise that given his injuries, it was hard to stay afloat. That’s when something incredible happened.
“Something began circling beneath me, and I mean something very large, very slimy, and very alive,” Hines recalls. “And I’m freaking out, and I’m thinking ‘You’ve got to be kidding me, I didn’t die jumping off that stupid bridge, and a shark is going to eat me?.’ I realized I’m not trying to stay afloat. I’m now lying on my back, being kept buoyant by this thing.”
Whatever it was, it kept Hines afloat until he was rescued by the Coast Guard. It was only later when he received a letter from someone who had witnessed the entire event from the bridge, that he discovered what had come to his rescue.
