Minnesota lawmakers consider suicide barriers on Washington Avenue Bridge

Before MJ Weiss addressed lawmakers at the State Capitol earlier this month, she carefully placed a photograph of her daughter on a desk facing them. The image showed a young woman with a bright smile and a striking mane of brown curls.

Her 29-year-old daughter, Kayla Gaebel, died by suicide on the Washington Avenue Bridge in November 2023. Since then, Weiss and a coalition of prevention activists have pressed state legislators to erect a permanent suicide barrier on the bridge, which connects the University of Minnesota’s East and West Banks over the Mississippi River.

Last year, their efforts to secure funding for the barrier fell through when a bonding bill that included $15 million for the project didn’t pass in the session’s chaotic close.

This year, Weiss, who has founded an organization called Kayla’s Hope, and representatives from Bloomington-based Suicide Awareness Voices of Education (SAVE), have returned with the same simple ask: Please, get it done.

Weiss said she walked along the bridge’s span following her daughter’s death. “I saw a frightening problem, a problem that has existed for a very long time,” she said. “I knew I needed to speak up for Kayla and others who are no longer with us.”

Her daughter was engaged to be married and had two toddlers at home.

It’s unknown how many suicides have occurred since the bridge was built 50 years ago, but estimates are in the hundreds.

After two more people died by suicide on the bridge last fall, the university erected a chain-link fence as a temporary barrier. While Weiss and others say a permanent solution is needed, they’re grateful for the temporary fix.

That’s because barriers work as a suicide deterrent, said Erich Mische, executive director of SAVE. “It’s about interrupting suicidal impulsivity, so that a person has time to rethink that decision, and to perhaps allow good Samaritans to come forward with aid and assistance,” he said.

Once that thought cycle is broken, “most individuals do not go out and seek another location; the data is clear that someone who has attempted suicide and survived there’s a 90% chance they will not attempt it again,” said Mische during testimony before the House Finance and Policy Committee earlier this month.

Other communities have grappled with similar, troublesome, bridges. Temporary barriers have been erected along the Natchez Trace Double Arch Bridge in Tennessee and a fence was built atop the Sunshine Skyway Bridge in Tampa, Fla.

The iconic Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco completed the installation of a net suicide barrier last year along its nearly 2-mile span. Since the bridge opened in 1937, nearly 2,000 people have plunged to their deaths, according to the Associated Press.

SAVE, Weiss and other prevention advocates say federal and state officials should incorporate anti-suicide measures in the design of new bridges or when a structure is overhauled.

The effort to retrofit the Washington Avenue Bridge with a permanent barrier has won bipartisan support in a deeply divided Legislature. But there’s disagreement among lawmakers over who should pay the estimated $15 million to build the permanent barrier.

The House bill directs Hennepin County, which owns the bridge, to divert $15 million from a county transportation tax to the university for the project. The Senate bill calls for the Metropolitan Council to pay for the work. In general, Republicans on both sides of the aisle were opposed to using state funding for the job.

But in a letter to members of the Senate Transportation Committee, Hennepin County Board Chair Irene Fernando said state capital investment funds would be the best source of funding because the project “will have a regional and statewide impact.”

A Met Council spokesperson declined to comment on the bill.

“This will save lives.”