Damn!

By PAUL KIRBY
Freeman staff

KINGSTON — City police stopped a 45-year-old man from killing himself after he watched a suicide scene in the Vietnam War movie “Full Metal Jacket,” Kingston Police Chief Gerald Keller said on Tuesday.

Keller said the man, whose name was not released, was trying take his own life with a rifle inside an apartment on Wilbur Avenue about 9:45 p.m. New Year’s Eve.

Keller said another man called police from inside the apartment and told officers his friend was “depressed” and intoxicated.

Keller said the suicidal man had watched a scene from the 1987 movie “Full Metal Jacket” in which the character played by Vincent D’Onofrio, now a Kingston-area resident, sits on a toilet, puts a rifle in his mouth and kills himself.

Police found the man sitting on a couch in the Wilbur Avenue apartment with the barrel a loaded .22-caliber rifle in his mouth, Keller said.

Officers sealed off the area around the apartment complex, forced their way into his apartment and convinced him to put down the weapon about 10 minutes later, Keller said.

The man was taken to Kingston Hospital for treatment, the chief said.

The incident was the second in recent weeks in which local police thwarted an apparent suicide attempt.

On Dec. 18, a town of Ulster police officer pulled a 40-year-old man off a railing on the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge. The man apparently planned to plunge to his death in the Hudson River, some 200 feet below.