A young woman dangled over a St. Paul freeway and passersby held onto her with all their might.

They prayed and talked to her.

“She was telling me that nobody loved her and I said, ‘We love you. I love you. We care,’ ” Bill Boursaw recalled. “It was very emotional and very scary, having her life in my hands.”

People worked together with St. Paul police officers to pull the woman to safety last August, and Police Chief Todd Axtell recognized two St. Paul residents on Tuesday with the Chief’s Award for Valor.

As Axtell honored Boursaw and Kelando Roberts, he said it took “strength and courage” for them to hold onto the 23-year-old woman through a chain-link fence. Boursaw estimated they grasped her for about 15 minutes until an officer was able to cut through the fence with wire cutters, so they could get the woman off the ledge.

“William and Kelando put themselves in harm’s way to help a stranger, a total stranger that day, who was in need and was crying for help when you really look at the whole situation,” Axtell said. He told the men soon after: “You make St. Paul proud.”

Axtell and the men noted that the rescue on the Dale Street bridge over Interstate 94 happened during a stressful time, several weeks after 21 officers were injured nearby on I-94 during a protest over the July 6 fatal shooting of Philando Castile by a St. Anthony police officer.

When Lucky Rosenbloom heard screaming from the overpass on Aug. 1, he saw an officer surrounded by people. He initially thought the officer was having trouble trying to arrest someone, and he ran to help. Then, Rosenbloom realized the true situation, and assisted in pulling the woman through the hole an officer cut in the fence.

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St. Paul man threatened another man with a sword, charges say In a tense time in the community, it was a good moment of residents and officers working together, Rosenbloom said.

Boursaw, who lives near the overpass, got involved when he saw the woman climbing over a fence near the freeway. He ran across the street and grabbed her, but she broke his grip. Once she got on the other side of the fence, over I-94, Boursaw said he followed her, trying to talk to her and calm her.

Roberts, who lives in the same apartment building as Boursaw, was heading home and saw his friend trying to help the woman.

“It was a lot of chaos, a lot of people were on the bridge and I just dropped everything and I assisted,” said Roberts, 33.

Boursaw, 62, held the woman’s shirt through the fence. Roberts lifted the fence as much as he could from the bottom to grab the back of the woman’s shorts.

“I said, ‘I’m not going to let her go, I’m not going to let her go,’ ” Roberts said.

There were a variety of people who helped, including Angela Martin, who said she was there from the beginning. She was driving by and saw the woman scaling the fence.

Martin pulled over, called the police and started talking to the woman, telling her, “Oh no, honey, you don’t have to do that,” she recalled Tuesday.

She grabbed the woman through the fence and yelled for help, directing another woman to run to the freeway and stop traffic, which she did.

Martin was thinking of her own daughters and loved ones as she tried to remain calm to help the distraught woman. The woman is still on Martin’s mind, and she hopes she was able to get the help she needed, she said.

The young woman was taken to the hospital on Aug. 1 for the “treatment that she needed that day,” Axtell said.

Rosenbloom said he was surprised that the police department did not also recognize Martin for her heroism. Although Martin said an officer asked for her name, it’s possible it didn’t make it into a police report, a police spokesman said. He said they don’t want to exclude anyone who should be recognized and would look into it.

HOW TO GET HELP

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is available 24/7 at 800-273-8255.

Suicide Awareness Voices of Education (SAVE), which is based in Bloomington, has information at save.org.