ROSELLE PARK — With temperatures rising into the 90s, Christine Curia wasn't surprised the young man standing on the side of the bridge in Roselle was bathed in sweat.

But that didn’t explain his vacant stare, or why he was standing on the very edge of the Gordon Street bridge, about 20 feet over the NJ Transit train tracks along the Roselle-Roselle Park border.

Curia rolled down her car window.

"Are you okay?" the Kenilworth resident asked.

The man turned to her, put his hands up and said, "Ma’am, I’m okay."

But then Curia noticed the orange extension cord. One end was tied around the man’s neck, the other was tied to the bridge. She knew the man wasn’t okay.

Roselle police Lt. James Loprete said the man was one step from taking his own life, but for the intervention of Curia and two others the morning of July 15.

"She saw it, and she helped and assisted in preventing him from doing anything," Loprete said.

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Curia jumped out of her car, blocking traffic on the narrow, two-lane bridge. As she walked toward the man, she asked another driver, Kamal Wedlock of Roselle, for help.

As Curia stepped over a metal guardrail and approached the man on the edge, Wedlock spotted a Union County sheriff’s cruiser and ran for help. In the meantime, Curia kept talking to the man, telling him that God loved him.

She grabbed his wrist and held him. As she talked to him, she said, she began to cry.

"It’s okay. It’s okay. It can’t be that bad," she said she told him as she untied the extension cord from around his neck.

The man, who Curia said appeared to be in his early 20s, never said a word, she recalled.

In the meantime, Wedlock had made it back to the bridge with Capt. Nancy Diesel of the Union County Sheriff’s Office. Together, the three pulled the man to safety.

"They put the kid in the back of the cop car," Curia recalled. "The sad part is, this kid is my son’s age. What could be so bad that he wanted to do this?"

Loprete said the man was taken to Trinitas Hospital in Elizabeth for evaluation.

"I knew I had someone else there with me," Curia said of Wedlock. "I’m glad he was there for my backup."

Wedlock said he was glad they were able to make a difference.

"It was a good thing that we were able to be there to help this kid out," Wedlock said. "Because nobody else was stopping."