Above and Beyond the Call

Marcelo Miranda, a police officer in La Plata, Argentina, got the task of talking an 18-year-old woman out of committing suicide. The woman had climbed a water tower and threatened to jump. Miranda solved the dilemma by handcuffing her to himself, then begging her not to jump and leave his children without a father. She agreed to climb down with him. Meanwhile, Orlando, Fla., police officer Rhonda Huckelbery took a sign language class offered by the department, but hadn’t practiced the skill in three years when she was called out for a deaf man threatening to jump off a building. She used sign language to talk him out of it. The man “laughed and said he was coming down because my sign language was so bad that I needed more help than he did,” Huckelbery said. (Reuters, UPI) ...Luckily he was able to read between the signs.