The call came in just after 2 a.m., the time Portland police Officers Michael Hall and Zachary DeLong say things on their Central Precinct night shift usually start to slow.



A resident of the Estate Hotel at 225 N.W. Couch St. told 911 dispatchers that there was a man on a ledge outside her room. The ledge was 5 stories up on the building's south side.



"It sounded like a burglary at first, and that's what we were thinking as we were driving there,'' DeLong said.



Instead, they saw a man standing on a 6- to 8-inch-wide ledge nearly 60 feet off the ground.



The officers began yelling up to the man, but he was unresponsive; he wouldn't move or talk. He was, Hall recalled, "clutching the building ... it wasn't like he was trying to get away from us. He was in a place that he shouldn't be."



Hall and DeLong ran up to the the hotel's fifth floor and the woman who called for help let them in. They pushed out the window screen and DeLong stuck his head out.



"I peeked around the window and he was right there, less than 12 inches away from my face," DeLong said. "It actually made me jump back a little bit."



The man was crying, sobbing, DeLong said. That's when DeLong's Crisis Intervention Training kicked in, he said. There was no crime being committed; it was time for compassion.



He began to calmly talk to the man, assuring him from the start that he was not in trouble.



"I told him, 'We just want to help you out, but to do that we need you to come inside.'" The back-and-forth seemed to work. The man inched closer to the open window, while DeLong repeatedly assured him that he and Hall were there to help.



Slowly, the man moved closer to the open window until he was close enough to touch.



Both officers reached out, each grabbing an arm, and pulled the man into the room through the window.



The rescue couldn't have lasted more than a minute or two, DeLong said. Once inside, it became clear the man was clearly in a mental health crisis and also intoxicated.



Paramedics from the Portland Fire Bureau were also in the room and later took the man to a hospital for mental health treatment, police officials said. He was not charged with any crime.



"He was at the point where he wouldn't have lasted very much longer on the ledge,'' DeLong said.



Hall and DeLong later learned that the man had crawled out on the narrow ledge on the building's west side, and then side-stepped his way nearly 100 feet around to the building's south side.



"It's scary to think about what could have happened,'' DeLong said.

-- Stuart Tomlinson