Teen Who Fell 50 Feet from a Bridge Warns about the Dangers of Selfies

After climbing over a concrete barrier to take a selfie, Triston Bailey plunged 50 feet to the dirt below. Miraculously, he lived. He now wants to use his experience to help warn others about the dangers of taking risky selfies.

Last November, while out with friends, the eighteen-year-old got out of the car on Dallas’ Margaret McDermott Bridge to take a selfie while standing on the “wrong” side of the bridge. The I-30 bridge has a pedestrian bridge running parallel with the road. But what Bailey didn’t realize before he climbed over the concrete barrier is that there is a large gap between the road and the pedestrian bridge. At first, his friends thought he was just trying to scare them with his yells as he plummeted the 50 feet to the ground.

Speaking to a group of reporters this past Tuesday at the Methodist Dallas Medical Center, as reported by NBC4, Bailey explained of his friends, “They looked over. Just like the movies, I’m just laid out there on the dirt.”

Rushed to the hospital, the doctors found a host of injuries — a broken pelvis and ribs to go along with other internal injuries — but were amazed that it wasn’t much worse. According to trauma surgeon Dr. Edgar Araiza:

He was the perfect specimen to survive that injury. There are a lot of people who wouldn’t be able to. We have people who fall from 10 feet and never leave the hospital, so for this young man to fall from 50 feet in the middle of the night into God knows what, and to emerge with his injuries is truly miraculous.

Triston Bailey is still in rehab, and he hopes that his experience will stop others from following in his foolhardy footsteps.

Teenagers, specifically teenage boys, are prone to doing stupid, dangerous things. I know I was. Like many other men, it’s a miracle I survived my teenage years. I have fallen off the side of a mountain, shot myself in the face with a BB gun, was semi-kidnapped while hitchhiking in Colorado, engaged in street racing on busy streets, and had more fireworks wars than I can remember (we’d shoot bottle rockets at each other). All that and more before my 20th birthday. Mercifully, there were times when the experience of others kept me from doing something stupid. Hopefully, Triston Bailey’s near-tragic experience will help prevent others from making the same mistake he did.