The people who stop to help

The Pioneer Press’ Mara Gottfried has the latest story of someone climbing over a St. Paul bridge, ready to jump.

He didn’t, because Kwame Anderson, 29, and his co-worker gave a rip and stopped to see if there’s something they could do.

It was the height of the morning rush hour on I-94 below when the man perched himself on the Earl St. bridge on Wednesday.

Anderson was a passenger in a beer truck driven by Jason Gaebel, and used a six-pack Coors Light as bait (save your jokes).

“If you come down from there, do you want to get a drink with me and talk about what’s going on?” Anderson asked.

“Beer has been bringing people together for a long, long time,” a St. Paul Police Department spokesman said. “Today, it brought people together in a life-saving way.”

As with every other incident in which someone is saved in stories like this, we’ll never know what desperation led to the moment, though Anderson says he’d really like to sit down with the guy and find out.

We all would.