In October after the WTC attacks, I was driving home along the 403 into Hamilton, and noticed someone standing on the side of the highway, on the OTHER side of the concrete blocks, meaning that he was standing on the ledge (which to me appears to be about 1.5 feet wide) long the bridge that goes over the canal that is there. The highway is pretty high up, and a fall from that place could have been deadly. The person wasn’t moving, and so wasn’t just walking along to get across the canal (though I don’t know what his destination could have been even if he WAS walking along it!) I immediately got suspicious and scared, especially less than a month after 9/11. I suppose an added fear (as unfounded as it is, really) was because the man appeared to be of middle eastern descent, and what with all the fears of Al Quaeda, and the fact that he was somewhere where he really shouldn’t be…well. like I said, I got scared.
So I drive the rest of the way home (5 mins) and call the local police, and tell them that there is a suspicious person standing just off the highway at the canal between the York and Main East exits. You know what the local cop says?
“If it’s the highway, call the OPP. We don’t handle that”. And she hung up on me.
So I called the OPP, and explained to them what I’d seen. The person on the other end of the line tells me:
“Well, if he’s OFF the highway, then its the local cop’s duty to look into it.”
At this point, I’m beginning to think that this guy has already jumped/set a bomb/launched a missle/whatever, and by the time cops get there, it’ll be too late. So I quite bluntly (but not rudely) told the OPP that I didn’t really care whose jurisdiction it was, but to just get someone, ANYONE out there to have a look.
They told me they’d handle it from there, then took my name and number and before hanging up told me it was probably just a hiker since part of the preserves there runs up to the highway.
I look at that spot every day, and there is NO WAY a sane hiker would be on that ledge - theres just nothing to cross over too, and its DANGEROUS! A lot of trucks go by there, and just a bit of a wind blast…well, unfortunately the SDMB knows as well as anyone that a blast off a truck can knock someone over, and it can be deadly.
I don’t know if the cops ever actually did investigate. I still think about it, and I am convinced that the guy intended to jump - whether he did or not, though, I don’t know. AFAIK, no body was found, so I guess thats good news. The Al Quaeda fears were, I believe, just a result of an imagination gone haywire, since the highway is still there in all of its pot-holed glory (though some of those holes could be a missle blast, I suppose!)
Still, despite all the bullshit the cops dragged me through, I would report it again in a heartbeat. Just in case.