I live in the Metropolitan Apartments at 950 S. Flower.
I witnessed the following Saturday evening, March 3, between approximately 6:30 and 7 pm, but have not seen anything of it in the LA Times or Downtown News.

As I was a witness, I feel compelled to provide some account of the passing of one in despair, whose last act has so embedded itself in my consciousness.
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There is a lot of construction going on in downtown Los Angeles, where I live. From my window, I can see five or six cranes at various sites, including one directly across the street from me, with an arm that extends out over the parking lot/construction site perhaps 20 stories up.

Saturday night I was out on my balcony with a beer watching the lights and traffic moving toward Staples Center. Police cars arrived and began to close Flower Street between Ninth and Olympic, the stretch of Flower that is directly under me, five floors down.

Flares were lit and when paramedics arrived I was still slow to put two and two together, thinking that maybe a VIP was moving through with an escort or maybe they were setting up for the LA marathon, to be run Sunday. I was unsure.

Until the spotlights began to climb the crane and then out along the arm, and a helicopter circled the area.

I called my girlfriend to let her know I thought maybe someone was up there.

A woman on the street said "don't do it."

I followed the lights as they ran up and down the long arm of the crane, then looked down for a moment, then right back up when the same voice said "oh my god."

I looked up in time to see him falling through space end over end, silent as a thought. The eye cannot place the act, not right away; there is no reference; the image confuses briefly. But as quickly one knows what will happen soon enough.

He landed in the construction area on perhaps the only square of asphalt not covered with equipment or stacks of wood or anything. I wondered if he'd marked his spot, if he knew exactly what he was doing, if he'd worked there, if this, if that.

The sound was like a bomb. I was surprised how loud the landing was. And at how the dust rose up like drapes above his body, slow to settle, like a dirt cloud laying someone to rest before it settled upon him like a paper thin burial sheet.

A few times Saturday night I woke with that image in mind, the man who seemed unusually large to me - I actually thought it as he fell: he's big - falling through the night like a man who'd jumped from a crane.

I have never felt the kind of sadness I have felt since Saturday night, as if in witnessing the act, some molecular despair had found me through the air and run my bloodstream to the brain and found a place from which to touch me with something that is otherwise too far removed to be noticed.