Renfrew man dies jumping from bridge

From the moment he felt the rush of air as he took his first step out of an airplane flying thousands of feet above the earth, Jason Corcoran was hooked on skydiving.

"He was an adventurous type of person who wanted to learn how to jump," recalled his skydiving instructor and friend Jeff Reckard, director of Skydive Pennsylvania. "He was one of the very, very few number of people we teach to jump to get that bug, that passion for jumping."

Corcoran, of Renfrew, Butler County, died Thursday after his parachute failed to deploy after he jumped from the Perrine Bridge, 486 feet over Snake River Canyon in Idaho. He was 30.

"When I got that phone call, if you had asked me to guess, I would have never guessed it," Reckard said. "He was so good."

Corcoran's passion for the sport quickly developed into a profession. Within a year of his first jump in 1995, the 1992 North Allegheny High School graduate had taken the tests and amassed enough jumps to qualify as an instructor.

Soon after, Corcoran began BASE jumping, which stands for "building, antenna, span, earth." They are the stationary places jumpers leap from, giving them a very short descent.

At the time of his death, Corcoran had logged over 2,100 skydives and more than 100 BASE jumps.

Corcoran had traveled to Twin Falls County, Idaho, last week with a group of seven others from Western Pennsylvania for five days worth of jumps, Reckard said. They were in the second day of their trip and on their sixth jump of the day when Corcoran's parachute failed.

Twin Falls County police said Corcoran hit the water at about 90 mph. Other jumpers were in a boat below the bridge and were able to recover Corcoran's body within about 15 seconds.

The cause of the parachute failure has not been determined.