It Doesn't Pay to Be a Good Samaritan

It's a nice spring day. You and a group of friends have put in your canoes in the Snake River, Twin Falls, Idaho. Paddling along, you near a bridge (in this case the Perrine Bridge). To your horror, you watch helpless as a woman climbs over the guard rail. An officer is trying to talk to her. She looks at him..... and jumps. Her body falls. Splashes into the river. Not far from where you sit in your canoe.

What would you do?

In this case, the canoeist and his friends paddled over to the woman's body and pulled it the shoreline where cops and medics met them.

How would you face the horror of watching someone commit suicide in front of you? Would you be able to deal with a body and pull it to shore?

Dennis Bohrn and his fellow canoeists did just that.

"The feelings don't hit you until it's all done. For my girlfriend, at 3 o'clock in the morning she called me crying. Amber was sobbing all the way through it. Mike and I, we were just being guys. It was something that didn't hit me until later." Bohrn recalled the woman's eyes remaining open.

Feeling numb, shocked and upset at the time of any similar incident may be the normal case, but allegedly, no feelings struck one of the police officers at all. While Bohrn has floating seat cushions in his canoe, they didn't count as life preservers. One of the officers promptly wrote him and his friends two tickets for failure to have a life preserver - tickets worth $85 each.

While comments on various websites to the ticket include the range from "How wrong?" and "Where's the sympathy?", one commenter brought up the point "What if the police had to go rescue the body bringers because they fell in while loading the body?"

Valid concern? No. Bohrn and fellow paddlers kept the body in the water and pulled it to shore.

Apparently the body was warmer than the cop's heart.

"Maybe you get kind of cold in that job," Bohrn observed. "I think there is a time and a place."

Perhaps that time and place could have waited until next time they were canoeing? How about a warning first or a gentle admonition? At least wait until everyone had calmed down?

Wayne Tousley, Twin Falls County Sheriff stands by his deputy's decision. But even he should agree that the timing of the ticket wasn't the best.