Man Falls Off Nutley Train Bridge Onto Jagged Rocks

A Nutley man suffered serious injuries when he fell off the Passaic Avenue Trestle Bridge on Monday afternoon.

According to Nutley Police Det. Sgt. Anthony Montanari, the 23-year-old resident was walking on the 30-foot train trestle north of Vreeland Avenue when he fell over the side and landed on some jagged rocks in the shallow creek below.

He lay there injured until a 12-year-old girl and her friends spotted him.

“They were looking at him and trying to decipher whether or not it was an actual human being in the water,” Montanari told Patch.

The girl went home to tell her father, who went back to verify her story and then immediately called police around 6 p.m.

When emergency responders arrived on the scene, they found the man incoherently moaning and unable to speak.

He was transported to University Hospital with a serious leg injury, and police are unaware of his current condition, Montanari said.

“We don’t want to speculate on how it happened,” he told Patch. “But we can conclude that there was nobody else up there with him at the time.”

Police were unable to determine if the man was intoxicated due to his injuries, and incident is under investigation, he added.

A DANGEROUS SHORTCUT

According to Montanari, the trestle is the property of the Norfolk Southern Corporation and the 23-year-old was technically trespassing at the time of his fall.

“I know that some of the younger kids in the community use that [trestle] to get from one side of the park to the other… against our wishes,” he told Patch. “Whenever police officers see them up there we discourage them and get them off of there. It’s a very high overpass and a very serious drop. Nobody should be walking across there. If a train were to come, there’s no place for them to get out of the way.”

The town has already seen a fatality at the location a few years ago, Montanari said.

“[That young man] fell from that overpass and nobody saw it happen,” he told Patch. “If not for that little girl, who knows what could have happened?”

Pictured above: The train trestle near Passaic Avenue, north of Vreeland Avenue

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