A woman who held tightly to her young daughter as they plunged 100ft from a bridge believed they would be together “in the afterlife”, a court was told yesterday.
The mother and child both survived the fall. Of the 83 people who had previously jumped from the Humber Bridge since it opened in 1981, only three had survived.
Angela Schumann, who was jailed for 18 months by Hull Crown Court yesterday after admitting attempted murder, decided to make the jump after her marriage broke up and the child was taken from her care.
Three days before Lorraine Tumalan-Schumann’s second birthday, her mother collected the little girl from her estranged huband, Julio Tumalan Nava, for what was supposed to be a weekend visit.
Schumann, 28, immediately boarded a train from Leeds to Hull and led her “little princess” to the bridge. Passers-by saw the German-born Hull University graduate guiding a pushchair across the giant suspension bridge. Moments later, CCTV cameras recorded her as she climbed over the walkway railings and leapt from the bridge, clutching Lorraine in her arms.
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Bridge staff and police rushed to the base of a tower on the southern side of the river and spotted a woman in the water, holding a young child aloft. The pair were in the water for 44 minutes.