Flying the Anxiety Skies

A troubled man, a tense standoff and only seconds to decide whether to shoot or wait. It's a difficult but common situation for police officers and others with a gun and a badge.

But when it plays out at a busy airport and a troubled man winds up dead, shot by those hired specifically to make airlines and passengers safer, nothing is routine. Toss in fears of terrorism, mental illness and threats of a bomb, and Wednesday's shooting by Federal Air Marshals becomes one of the most scrutinized in the post-Sept. 11 era.

So far the investigation into Rigoberto Alpizar's final minutes aboard an American Airlines 757 that was to take off for Orlando, Fla., is focusing on his wild rage and whether he said he had a bomb. Federal officials from several agencies said Alpizar repeatedly made that claim and reached for a backpack, leaving the two air marshals little choice but to open fire on the jetway just outside the plane's doors.

Several of the 113 passengers who arrived in Orlando from Miami, however, said Alpizar may have been delusional and ran out of the plane only because he feared a bomb was on board.

The task of sorting out exactly what happened falls mainly to the Miami-Dade Police department, which is in charge of the homicide investigation. Miami-Dade Police Lt. Veronica Ferguson issued a statement saying early indications point to Alpizar running frantically from the airplane "with a backpack strapped to his chest, yelling that he had a bomb."

Detective Juan Del Castillo said people on the plane other than the marshals also heard the bomb threats. Del Castillo said Alpizar's threats and the marshal's orders to him were all in English.

After running off the plane, Alpizar, 44 of Maitland, Fla., turned in the jetway, walked menacingly toward the agents and reached into his backpack, police said. Marshal's stepped back before firing at Alpizar, who died at the scene, police said.

Police would not say whether he made the threats on the airplane, out on the jetway or in both locations. The marshals, who were not identified, have been put on paid administrative leave pending a full investigation.

At its best, the shooting which occured two days ago in Miami is a sober reminder of the constant tension which still persists here. It's pretty horrifying. Alpizar's behaviour was clearly confused and frightening to those who were there with him; his wife has stated that her trip with her husband, who did not have access to his bipolar medication for the duration of the flight, was a terrible exercise in anxiety and tension which ended with his explosive behaviour and his death at the hands of armed Marshalls.

So far, even the claim that he'd stated he had a bomb has come under confusion: several passengers on the flight have said that they never heard him say this. His erratic behaviour was itself frightening, and the way he clutched his backpack across his chest would have been terrifying to anybody. No explosives were found in any of his luggage- nothing tangible that would suggest he was anything other than a desperately confused person in a bout of mania he's had to deal with for much of his life. His friends describe him as everything opposite a terrorist.

With the anxiety of this country, absolutely everybody is suspect, everybody is a horror waiting to happen. We are the most fearful culture- not because we enact it, but because we can't get rid of it. Here, perhaps Alpizar was reacting in absolute terror thinking there was a bomb aboard his plane; and he was shot because we were afraid he had a bomb.

There was, of course, a recent parallel shooting in London when, only days after their subway bombings, London police shot and killed a young Brazillian named Jean Charles de Menezes. His case was somewhat more confused than this one- but the coverup of the facts by the police and the immediate judgement of the necessary action of his death exposed the irrationality of all of this. None of this makes sense.

In fact, the police in the de Menezes case are very likely to be prosecuted for their actions- which they felt at the time to be completely appropriate action given the confusion of the circumstances of the world they suddenly found themselves living in. When de Menezes was shot and killed, and before we knew his name or that he had a name, Tony Blair stated that there could be "no doubt" that he was a terrorist, and that the action was done with due course and judgement. Likewise, before the complex and scary scenario of the Alpizar shooting gave us even his name, or the terrored pleas of his wife, a woman who was simply trying to get home with her unmedicated husband, who we sympathize with beyond belief, The Administration has claimed this action as appropriate given the confusion of the situation.

Long-Eared Ronin put up a post about the coverup of the de Menezes issue called "You're Next...?" I didn't like that title because it was scarily present. I didn't like the openness of it, the fact that there were two unknowns punctuated- an elipsis which gave way to the untold, and a questionmark opening the door to the unknown.

It was, of course, the perfect title then, and it is now even more perfect. Because the fact is- any of us are subject to the converging forces of confusion and terrorist fueled anxiety. And if you behave in any way to contribute to that confusion...

You're next.

The sad part is this- given the horrors shown in Katrina, where nothing anybody did could ever make the situation more clear, where every good action became more clouded in fear and missteps and every bad action was false and myth, and yet the prominent sin was the non-action of FEMA and others, it's clear that there's nothing any of us can do, when you get down to it, to clear up a bad situation.

So just don't get in them.