Nobody enjoys being ticketed for traffic violations, but when faced with one, the reactions tend to be limited mostly to paying them or occasionally wasting a day in municipal court lying to a portly judge. It came as some surprise, then, to a New Jersey state trooper when the man he’d been trying to pull over threw himself off a bridge.

According to a department spokesperson, the trooper was pursuing a grey SUV that had been speeding and swerving its way toward the Walt Whitman Bridge, which spans the Delaware River. The driver ignored the trooper’s efforts to get him to pull over until, having hit the span of the bridge, the driver jumped out of his SUV and took a 30-metre plunge into the waters below.

At that point, the driver was “lost to the trooper’s sight,” a state in which, despite the combined search efforts of the Coast Guard, New Jersey State Police, Delaware River Port Authority Police, Camden and Gloucester City Fire Departments and Philadelphia Fire Department and Police Marine Unit, he has so far remained.

» Scott Saxon