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Jim Hickey of Claremont, California, planned to jump off the
Perrine Bridge into the Snake River as another person set his
parachute on fire, the newspaper reported, citing local
sheriff's officials.
The paper said Hickey intended to drop that parachute and deploy
a backup, but the stunt went awry and he burst into flames
before falling to his death.
In a video of the incident published to YouTube on Monday,
Hickey can be seen erupting into a fireball while another person
jumped from the bridge and landed safely below.
The details come two days after renown rock climber Dean Potter
and another man died while attempting jumps from a
3,000-foot-high (900-metre) cliff in California's Yosemite
National Park, the latest in a string of deaths nationwide in
the extreme sport of BASE jumping.
Hickey, a retired accountant, had participated in more than
1,000 jumps in the decade since he took up a sport in which
parachutists free-fall from such fixed points as cliffs, bridges
and buildings, according to Tom Aiello, a friend and owner of a
BASE jumping school in Twin Falls.
Aiello estimated that 500 people a year parachute from the
bridge. BASE is an acronym for buildings, antennas, spans and
Earth, which are the kinds of platforms used by jumpers.
Officials said Hickey was the second person to die there
attempting such a jump this year.
(Reporting by Curtis Skinner in San Francisco Editing by Jeremy
Gaunt.)
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