A suicide attempt early Tuesday in Mexico City ended with a meal of tacos courtesy of two police officers who talked a young man down from an overpass.

Atanacio Rosas and Bartolo Ramírez responded to an emergency call in the borough of Gustavo A. Madero, where they found a suicidal 17-year-old ready to leap from an overpass into the traffic passing below. Another man was on the scene restraining him.

Rosas said later he saw his oldest son in the young man, and simply treated him as a son.

The man told the officers that he was not from Mexico City and had neither friends nor family there. He had no job, no money and was hungry.

“I said, ‘Well, what’s the problem, we’ll take you right now to get something to eat,’” Rosas recalled. Inviting the man to have some tacos just happened to be what occurred to him at that moment, he added.

The three sat down for a meal at a nearby taquería where the young consumed five tacos al pastor and a soft drink before the two officers turned him over to a youth services agency, where paramedics pronounced him inebriated.

The two officers have since become famous on social media where, said Ramírez with a laugh, they are known as the “tacos police.” On Facebook, many were proclaiming that “tacos save lives.”

Source: Reforma (sp)