Uber drivers have gotten a bad reputation lately. But many of them a good people who know to do the right thing. Such is the case of Tampa area Uber driver, Chad Farley, who helped keep one of his passengers from jumping off a bridge to his death.
Monday evening, Farley picked up a man in his mid 20’s from his house. The man began the conversation with Farley, telling the driver that he’d recently been diagnosed with brain cancer.
“I told him about my mother, who passed from cancer,” Farley writes in a Facebook post. “I asked him if he was in school and he said yes, that he wanted to be a counselor, that he wanted to help hopeless people. I commended him for that.”
But when Farley learned the man wanted to be dropped off at the top of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, more than 200 feet above the water, he was suspicious. The man told him that his doctor told him to call an ambulance from one of the phones on the bridge.
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Farley wasn’t buying it, so he got his passenger to repeat the explanation to several workers at the bridge’s toll booth. A supervisor at the toll booth told the passenger to use one of the phones at the rest area near the edge of the water just past the toll booth.
The Uber driver had the foresight to take a picture of the man before he left the car. As soon as the passenger got out, Farley called 911 and then emailed police the picture he took of the man.
State troopers arrived on the scene and found the man in the water. He had walked in and submerged himself, but the troopers were able to find him and bring him to shore, where they performed CPR until an ambulance arrived.
The man is now in stable condition at a Tampa area hospital. The Florida Highway Patrol has praised Farley, as well as the responding officers, for their role in preventing the man from jumping off the bridge.
“We deeply appreciate Mr. Farley’s quick thinking and compassion for his rider, as well as law enforcement’s fast response,” a spokesperson said.
Farley says he’s planning to visit the man in his hospital.