The deputy grabbed a distraught man sitting on a ledge and pulled him to the ground.
The slumped man sat with his legs dangling from a highway overpass, as traffic whooshed by, far below.
York-Poquoson Sheriff's Deputy James Robinson was responding to a call of a suicidal man on U.S. Route 60 in Yorktown, Virginia.
"What's going on, man?" Robinson can be heard saying on video captured by his bodycam. "Can I talk to you for a moment? You wanna tell tell me what's up?"
For several harrowing minutes, the man says nothing as Robinson tries to engage him. When Robinson asks the man to look at him, he stares, eyes downcast, at the cars below.
"I just knew I didn't want him to go over," Robinson told InsideEdition.com. "And I didn't want to go over as well."
When Robinson saw the man put down his cellphone, he decided to make a move. "I didn't know if he maybe had text[ed] his last goodbye, or what, but he put his cellphone down."
That's when Robinson quickened his pace, telling the man a made-up story about going to help someone else on the bridge. "I just ran up behind him, and with my left arm, grabbed him [around] the chest, and with my right arm, I grabbed him on the shoulder."
He pulled the man to the asphalt, where he lay sobbing, his shoulders heaving.
"What's wrong?" he asked the weeping man.
"I have nothing left," the man says. "You do," Robinson responds. "You have plenty left. You got a lot left. You got a lot in you."
The video ends there. Afterward, he continued talking to the man until paramedics arrived. Robinson declined to describe what was bothering the man.
"Knowing that person has another day to live, and hopefully, live out the rest of their life ... that's all the happiness that I need right there."
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