SAN DIEGO It's one thing to know your mom committed suicide by jumping off the San Diego-Coronado Bridge. It's another to know she took you with her.

Bertha Loaiza survived that 246-foot-plunge more than 32 years ago. She was 3. The media called her a "miracle," the first person ever to go over the side and live. People from as far away as Mississippi sent her cards, letters, dolls and stuffed animals as she recovered from eye and leg injuries.

The emotional wounds are still healing.

Now the lifelong South Bay resident wants to be an advocate for bridge safety and mental health awareness. She's speaking out as Caltrans does a feasibility study of suicide barriers on the bridge, where more than 400 people have killed themselves since the span opened in 1969.

"I want to be the voice of those who can't speak," she said in an interview last week, "and the face of those who aren't ashamed."

She grew up thinking her mother had died in a car accident, which was partly right. There was a car involved, a green Ford Pinto that Angelica Gomez, 24, parked on the bridge midspan at about 5 p.m. on Aug. 4, 1985. Then she took her daughter in her arms and dropped into the bay.

Two fishermen in a boat pulled them from the water and started CPR. The girl resumed breathing; her mother did not. Officials later surmised that Gomez had taken the brunt of the fall, shielding her daughter by hitting the water first.

They also said, after a coroner's investigation, that Gomez had been suffering from depression and was going through a major life-change, a divorce from her husband. The business card of a counselling psychologist was found in the Pinto.

Her daughter suffered a traumatic cataract in her right eye and a broken right hip. She wore an eye patch and was in a body cast for months.

From the outset, she had no memory of the fall, leading some to believe she may have been asleep in her mother's arms. To explain her injuries, she told people she'd had an accident in a park near her house.

Raised by her maternal grandparents, she grew up in a home filled with pictures of her mom so it's not as if anyone was trying to hide that part of her past, she said. But there were things that went unsaid, and children have active imaginations. That's how she came to believe her mom had died in a car accident, maybe one involving a drunken-driver.

When she was about 17, she found a VHS tape with news coverage of the bridge incident. "I must have watched it 100 times," she said. "I kept saying, 'That looks like me.' That's when it all came together."

She saw a therapist to sort out her grief and feelings of betrayal. She learned about the local chapter of Survivors of Suicide Loss and started attending monthly meetings.

It helped to spend time with others who understood some of what she was going through, she said, but there were also occasions when people remembered her story from the media coverage, and that made her uncomfortable. She would stay away from meetings for a while, pretend like maybe the suicide never happened.

A turning point came as she wrestled with what to think of her mother. "I didn't like her too much," Loaiza said. "I kept asking, 'Why did you bring me along?'"

It took years, but she eventually came to this conclusion:

"My mom did love me. People with severe depression are in a really dark, ugly world, and I think she brought me with her because she believed she was the only one who could best take care of me. And in a way she did. She shielded me at the end, taking most of the impact. She hurt me, but she saved me, too."

She knows others might not see it that way, but it works for her. And she said it's enabled her to be more comfortable talking about what happened with her family and friends, to move beyond the shame that often surrounds suicide.

"Depression is so misunderstood by people," she said. "I used to be one of them."

Now she's even thinking about leading her own survivors group, using her bilingual skills to help people who speak Spanish and might not otherwise be able to participate.

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Several weeks ago, Loaiza saw a documentary about Kevin Hines, who at age 19 survived a suicide jump off the Golden Gate Bridge in 2000.

Diagnosed with bipolar disorder, Hines is now a mental health advocate and gives presentations all over the country.

Inspired by the film, Loaiza contacted the Coronado San Diego Bridge Collaborative for Suicide Prevention, which has been leading the effort to get barriers installed. She offered to share her story.

"I think she can raise awareness in ways that no one else can," said Rhonda Haiston, one of the collaborative's founders. "What can we do to make sure that what happened to her never happens again?"

Loaiza knows there are people who think fences or other installations would mar the beauty of the bridge as it sweeps across the bay. She knows there are people who think those intent on killing themselves will just go somewhere else (even though research shows otherwise).

But even a five-minute delay in a suicide attempt might make the difference, she said. Maybe they go to the bridge and a barrier thwarts them, and then they see a sign with the suicide helpline number.

And then they pick up the phone.

Loaiza turns 37 later this year. She works for a local health care provider, is married and has two children, a son who is 10 and a daughter who is 6.

She recently told them how their grandmother died, and her son had the same question that long haunted her: "Why did she have to take you?"

When the boy was 3, the age Loaiza was when she went off the bridge, she had a tough year. "I was a paranoid mess," she said.

She remembers going to a McDonald's, watching her son play, and wondering what could have been so hard about raising a child of that age that would have made her mom do what she did.

"I wanted to make sense of it," she said. "I wasn't at the place yet where I understood that it will never make sense. I will never have an answer for why she did it. I will never know.

"All we can do is move on, work with what we have, and try to make the world a better place."