He’s got more saves than an NHL goalie.
A veteran Port Authority cop has stopped a dozen suicidal people from jumping off the George Washington Bridge — and put his own life on the line in his latest rescue attempt.
“It makes you feel very good,” said Police Officer Jesse Turano, who found himself dangling over the edge of the span Tuesday to keep a 37-year-old man from jumping into the frigid Hudson River.
“I wasn’t going to let him go — I wasn’t going to let him die while I was out there,” he said.
Turano, a nine-year veteran, began working at the GW Bridge in 2010 and since then has prevented at least 12 suicides. The victims have been a mix of young and old, men and women, Turano said.
In one case, Turano, a weightlifter, had to use brute strength to snatch a would-be jumper out of thin air by the man’s belt.
At 6:40 p.m. Tuesday, Turano and his partner, Officer Brendan Mulderrig, got a call about a suicidal man who had exited his vehicle on the lower-level roadway near the New York side.
The officers soon spotted an abandoned 2011 Toyota, but couldn’t find the driver — until they heard him screaming into his phone.
“What I did is tell him, ‘Relax! Relax! All I want to do is talk to you.’ All he would say was, ‘Get way! Get away! All I want to do is die!’ ”
The suicidal man, from East Rutherford, NJ, was standing on a 1-foot-square beam, meaning that “if he moved an inch or two to the right or left, he was gone,” Turano said.
The cop said he grabbed the man by the back of his jacket when he paused to look at his phone while Mulderrig grabbed the man’s leg, a scene that left the man “sort of suspended in mid-air.”
Seconds later, after a brief struggle, the pair wrestled the man to safety so he could be taken to Englewood Hospital for treatment.