Kyle Herrman could not stop thinking about the desperate stranger.

He cried for her.

He prayed for her.

Yet he didn't even know her name. All he knew was the 23-year-old woman jumped off the Jamieson Avenue overpass and landed on Interstate 44 just feet from his car. "If she had come crashing through my windshield and hurt me, maybe I would be angry," said Herrman, 31, of Kirkwood. "But I can't help but feel sympathy for her."

The woman survived. As doctors tended her broken bones this week, Herrman tended his own wounds from witnessing such a traumatic event. He talked with his pastor. He hugged his family. But mostly he prayed. "I feel grateful that I was involved so that I could pray for her," Herrman said. "My anger is more against the evil in this world that would cause her to make this decision." Experts say suicide attempts are rarely witnessed - especially by strangers. Yet in the St. Louis area this week, strangers watched three times as people tried to take their lives.

One leapt from a bridge Tuesday, one jumped in front of a train Wednesday and one shot himself on a busy highway Thursday. The people who saw them may be in as much danger of emotional trauma just as loved ones left behind, mental health experts like Joseph M. Rothberg say. "A successful suicide is actually a failed cry for help," said Rothberg, who studied suicide with the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. "It's hard to construct a rational explanation for an irrational behavior," he said. "But some may make a suicidal gesture in a public way in hopes they will be saved." A study Rothberg published in 1994 found that only about 4 percent of the suicides studied had been witnessed.

The woman who survived the fall from the Jamieson Avenue overpass about lunchtime Thursday told paramedics she suffered from mental illness, Herrman said. Early the next morning, a transient woman, 39, who disappeared from a Washington hospital two months ago, threw herself in front of a moving MetroLink train near the University of Missouri at St. Louis. She also survived, but doctors told police she may never recover from a serious head injury. Late Thursday night, a 26-year-old man crashed his car on Interstate 55 in St. Louis and then shot himself to death in front of witnesses trying to aid him, police said. The man, a police officer for the Department of Veterans Affairs, was driving south near Loughborough Avenue when his car sideswiped at least one other vehicle and then crashed into the concrete median. He got out and spoke to the other driver and witnesses. Then he got back into the car, turned up the radio and shot himself in the head.

Witnesses might suffer if they don't tend their own emotional needs, said Steve Estopare of the Mental Health Association of Greater St. Louis. "People will experience disbelief and shock. Flashbacks may become very vivid. "Witnesses should seek counseling if only to talk through feelings, he said. Estopare also suggests that a witness should engage in some way with the person who attempted a suicide, to show the act did not go unnoticed. "Don't leave with no words said," he said. "Say, 'I just saw you try to take your life.' Tell them what's going on. I'm here to help. Keep it very simple."