Kevin Kot was a thirty-seven-year-old electrical contractor who lived a rather simple, ordinary suburban life. Married with two kids, Kot loved his job. On Fridays, it was Kot who delivered payroll to the company’s dozens of employees at various job sites throughout the Capital District. Generally speaking, Fridays were Kot’s favorite day of the week.
By 11:00 A.M., on August 14, Kot was traveling east over the Troy-Menands Bridge—which connects the village of Menands to Troy—on his way to the Emma Willard School, where his company had been working on a job for the past few weeks. The bridge spans some sixty-two feet above the Hudson River waterline. Traffic travels fast over the four-lane bridge, normally fifty-five to sixty miles per hour.
Driving in the far right lane—two lanes head east, two west—Kot saw a “very nondescript Astro van” coming up from behind him on the left side, in the left lane. He took notice of the van only because he had one just like it sitting in his driveway at home.
As the van crept up alongside his Pontiac Firebird, a fine mist of what Kot initially thought were “sand pebbles” began bouncing off his front windshield. Originally, it sounded to Kot as if he had been in back of a state plow truck dropping sand and salt on the roads during winter. But as the van passed, Kot’s vision was quickly shrouded as he realized that what at first he thought to be sand pebbles was actually shards of glass pelting his windshield.
“I was thinking,” Kot said later, “it was stuff falling from the top of the bridge.” The bridge was old. It needed work.
Yet, as quickly as Kot thought that the bridge was falling apart, he looked to his left and saw the Astro van lock up its brakes and begin to skid sideways into his lane. At that point, he saw what appeared to be an “orange jumpsuit coming out of the side window of the van.”
What the hell?
It was Evans. He had kicked out the side window of the van and was climbing out from it.
Kot then slammed on his brakes and began to skid.
In back of the van was the second USMS vehicle, a Ford Expedition; it, too, locked up its brakes and went into a tailspin.
They were about three-quarters of the way over the bridge.
As Evans kicked out the passenger-side window and jumped out, he got hung up for a moment on the broken glass and dangled there, his feet hitting the ground as the van continued skidding to a stop.
Unnerved by what he was witnessing, Kot watched as Evans, with the finesse of a stuntman, then took a headfirst dive onto the pavement after shimmying himself free from the window and rolled on the tar with the momentum of the van.
“For a noticeable amount of time,” Kot said, “he was struggling to get loose. He hit the pavement and just started tumbling.”
With the tires squealing and Kot’s Pontiac beginning to come to a stop, he almost hit Evans as he bounced off the tar, rolled a few times and popped up off the ground and onto his feet as if the scene had been scripted for him.
As Evans got up off the ground, he hopped over the guard-rail and made it onto the sidewalk that ran along the bridge on both sides. Once there, he made a mad dash, Kot insisted, for the center of the bridge.
After racing out of the vehicle, the two marshals in the Expedition in back of Kot’s Pontiac headed Evans off from one side of the bridge, while the two marshals in the van, after jumping out and running, trailed him from behind.
When Evans saw that he was cornered and had nowhere left to run, he glanced quickly back at the marshals coming up from behind, then turned and looked at the marshals in front of him.
There’s no way out.
Faced with being bottled in on both sides and traffic completely stopped, Evans looked up toward the sky, bowed his head and then tucked his body underneath the second guard-rail—a solid piece of metal running along the outer side of the sidewalk.
With sixty-two feet between him and the water below, Evans jumped.