I have to admit I’m curious as to what actually happened on American Airlines Flight 924. Here’s what CNN said:
Dave Adams, a spokesman for the Federal Air Marshal Service, said Alpizar had run up and down the plane’s aisle yelling, “I have a bomb in my bag.”
But according to the same article:
. . .no other witness has publicly concurred with that account. Only one passenger recalled Alpizar saying, “I’ve got to get off, I’ve got to get off,” CNN’s Kathleen Koch reported.
And then there’s this, from Fox:
Before he ran off the plane he “uttered threatening words that included a sentence to the effect that he had a bomb,” said James E. Bauer, agent in charge of the Federal Air Marshal Service field office in Miami.
And this, from Time:
“I never heard the word ‘bomb’ on the plane,” McAlhany told TIME in a telephone interview.
Well, any time you have a lot of eyewitnesses, you’ll hear several versions of what happened. Still, I think it’s interesting that not one passenger is backing up the Federal Air Marshal Service claim that Alpizar made a bomb threat, a claim that the FAMS appears to be backing away from. Uttering “threatening words that included a sentence to the effect he had a bomb” is a long way from running “up and down the plane’s aisle yelling, ‘I have a bomb in my bag.'”
Still, what’s an air marshal, or any flight crew member, to do when a passenger starts acting crazy? How can you instantly and correctly judge whether someone is acting strangely due to mental illness or acting strangely because he’s about to detonate a bomb? Remember Richard Reid, the shoe bomber? With him, you had it all: weird behavior, outward manifestations of mental illness, and an actual attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds.
Unfortunately for Mr. Alpizar, air travelers today live in a shoot first/ask questions later world. There isn’t any leeway for manic-depressives who quit taking their meds and start acting out.
. . . and I was going to end this entry there, but I just had a chilling thought: what if Mr. Alpizar wasn’t mentally ill? What if Mr. Alpizar didn’t freak out on that airplane? I’m thinking, of course, of Jean Charles de Menezes, the poor Brazilian who was shot and killed by police in the London subway. Contrary to initial – and steadfastly repeated – police reports, he hadn’t been earlier observed acting suspiciously on subway surveillance cameras, he didn’t jump a turnstile, he wasn’t running from the cops, and he wasn’t wearing a bulky jacket that might have concealed a bomb. The only part of the story that turned out to be true was that the police shot him seven times. For some reason.
I hope it’s true that Mr. Alpizar flipped out severely enough that the air marshals were justified in shooting him. I think that’s probably what happened. I hope that’s what happened.
Update (12/9/05): Yesteday, Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly commented on the same discrepancies in news coverage. Today, he posts an interesting followup.