UPDATE: Former Walnut Creek mayor and his Alamo family help rescue teen girl who jumped from Golden Gate Bridge

Merle Hall, who served as Walnut Creek mayor in 1986-87 and on the city council in the 1980s, was out sailing with his son, Eric Hall and his grandsons, around the Golden Gate Bridge's south tower Sunday morning.

Hall, who lives in Walnut Creek, and his son and grandsons, who live in Alamo, are all experienced sailors. Riding in a chartered 40-foot sailboat they had hired for the weekend, the four were getting ready to let the incoming ocean tide and wind from the  fog carry them on a sailing journey around the bay. 

And then, Eric Hall's youngest son, Ethan 14, a Stone Valley Middle School student, heard a splash. 

The family assumed that the splash had come from a whale. But then they saw and heard pedestrians above them on the bridge, franticaly calling down and pointing to some location on the water not far from where they were.

It was then that they saw someone floating in the cold, gray waves

"We saw this poor girl on port side of the boat," said Eric Hall. "She was just floating, partially submerged, and there was lots of blood all over her face."

Eric Hall immediately knew that they were seeing what he had always feared encountering while sailing near the Golden Gate Bridge: the body of someone who had committed suicide by jumping from the landmark bridge.  He knew it was a stark reality of this otherwise spectacular landmark. He also knew that very few people survived the 220-foot drop. 

Except this time, he thought, the person he saw floating some 30 feet from his boat might not be dead. 

For a splint second, Eric Hall asked himself whether his  teenage sons, who would turn out to be close in age to to girl who was  floating in the water, should witness this recovery. No doubt, the Halls would be on a mission to rescue someone who had just tried to kill herself. For that brief second Eric Hall wondered, were his sons mature enough to face the reality of suicide and this level of human despir? And what if she was already dead? Were they old enogh to see a dead body? 

"I had a flash in my mind, seeing her in the water with her face covered in blood, telling my sons, 'Hey kids,' I'll deal with this,'" he said. "But then it flashed in my mind, it's going to take all uf us. You lay down the track as the train is rolling." 

In the end, the Halls had to act.  The girl, if alive, needed their help. Almost automatically, that's what the four Hall men did; they dropped their sails and rushed into action, operating under the assumption that his was a resce mission.  

First Merle Hall, then Henry Hall, 15, a freshman at Monte Vista High, took the helm, battling the five-knot currents and fog and wind to move their boat closer to the girl. Ethan kept watch, and eventually Merle Hall left the helm to radio Coast Guard their location.

Eric Hall  moved to the back of the boat, to its dive platform. As the boat reached the girl bobbing in the waves he grabbed ahold of her. His son, Ethan, handed him a line to help hold her face above water. When he first saw her, Eric was not sure she was still alive, but then he heard her moan and cough up blood and ocean water. 

The girl was dressed in a navy sweatshirt, with the word, "California" written on the chest, gray sweat pants and pink Converse shoes. A wave came and washed the blood off her face. The Halls later learned that she was with her family on vacation visiting San Francisco from their home in Southern California. Sometime before jumping, the girl, whose name was not released, had handed her sister her diary, which contained a suicide note, the Contra Costa Times reported. 

Eric  Hall held on to the girl  for what seemed to be an eternity.. He was reluctant to pull her up onto the boat, because he didn't know the extent of her injuries and worried that moving her could  cause more harm. Although the girl never regained consciousness, Eric Hall said he kept talking to her, telling she was not alone and that help was on the way.

Coast Guard rescuers from the station in Sausalito reached the girl at 11:13 a.m. California Highway Patrol spokesman Patrick Roth told the Times the girl is expected to survive, making her one of a very small percentage of people who don’t die from falling into the cold, rushing currents beneath the bridge. She broke no bones but suffered internal injuries and a punctured lung. 

Eric Hall said his father and sons contined on the sailboat ride around the bay Sunday but in a stunned silence, puncutated by brief conversations about the girl,  how she was doing, the reasons for her jump, and their sudden participation in her rescue. 

"She's the same age as my boys," Eric Hall said. "We were just trying to get our heads around it."

While Eric Hall is relieved to hear that her physical injuries will heal, he understands that she and her family will have to confront other more complex psychological wounds. 

Eric, a marketing executive between jobs, is one of five children of Merle Hall, the  founder of what is now known as Hall Equities Group, one of the leading development companies in Walnut Creek. Merle Hall turned over the business to his oldest son Mark in 1992 and soon after, spent the next eight years sailing the seven seas and circumnavigating the globe on his 58-foot offshore performance sailing yacht Tin-Tin. Hall still lives in Saranap neighborhood of Walnut Creek.