Area Teen Follows Friends off Bridge

The old parental adage “if your friends jumped off a bridge would you do it too?” was finally put to the test late Thursday evening after 15 year-old Jason Markley witnessed two of his friends, Scotty Thompson, 15, and Karl Greggors, 16, hurl their lanky teenage bodies from the Fifth Street Bridge.

Long considered to be a rhetorical question, Markley found himself face to face with this hypothetical situation in a very concrete way as he was forced to make a decision: depart from the norms of his peers and face social ostracization or leap to certain, bloody death.

As Markley hesitated police negotiators were called to the scene. A short time later the boy’s parents arrived to find young Jason teetering on the edge of the bridge, gripping the icy railing and gazing down at the mangled corpses of his friends 150 ft below.

While Markley’s parents pled with the stubborn teenager, law enforcement officials prepared for the worst. An emergency response team was sent to the bottom of the gorge and a grief counselor was brought on site. Chief negotiator Philip Ortiz commented “Peer pressure is a powerful force. There’s not much we can do. We’ve seen kids inhale, inject, consume poisons, beat each other beyond recognition, and yes, leap to certain death. When it comes to teenagers, none of them are as dumb as all of them are.”

Witnesses report that Markley’s last words were “I don’t want to jump, but all my friends are doing it. What choice do I have?”