Archive for March 31st, 2010
Section of TWA cockpit located; ‘Critical’ step in investigation
By Pamela Ferdinand, and Fred Kaplan | August 3, 1996 for The Boston Globe
EAST MORICHES, N.Y.–In a critical step toward finding out what downed TWA Flight 800 more than two weeks ago, federal investigators yesterday confirmed they have located part of the cockpit.
It will take at least 24 hours for the section – the cockpit’s front windows and part of the interior – to be recovered and tested for traces of an explosive device. But smaller critical pieces of debris recovered yesterday from the same area already are at the FBI laboratory in Washington, D.C., undergoing forensic tests, officials said.
“It’s sort of the nerve center of the aircraft,” said Robert Francis, vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board. “It’s the area you’re interested in being able to look at in any accident.”
With this discovery, analysts will soon be able to examine what remains of the plane’s controls and electronics. A huge chunk of plane found the day before contains the first-class section.
“If we are right, if the event was caused by something in the front of the aircraft,” said FBI Assistant Director James Kallstrom, “hopefully, we’re going to see that, whether it was in the cargo or whether it was in the food carts or the first-class cabin.”
Investigators believe a bomb was set in the forward section of the aircraft because of radar signals and the way the debris scattered in the ocean. The recovery of the cockpit at the bottom of the debris pile is further evidence that the explosion sheared off the nose of the plane first, Francis said. All of the passengers and crew were killed.
A small chip from a food service cart removed from the body of a first-class passenger has further led investigators to believe the blast occurred in or near the cart because the smallest pieces of retrievable evidence are often nearest the blast – as in the case of Pan Am 103, which exploded in 1988 over Lockerbie, Scotland.
“Obviously, we want to know what it looks like in there,” Kallstrom said, referring to the cockpit. “We want to know what it looks like in the entire first-class cabin . . . and we want to look into those extra cargo containers.”
Galley items, such as a coffee maker with the coffee pot still in the maker, a burnt tray table and part of a cart have been recovered, along with tiny pieces of shrapnel from first-class passengers’ bodies and seats, said sources close to the investigation.
Carts used to serve first-class passengers are usually stowed in a galley located above the front cargo hold, and sources said investigators are focusing on how food service supplies were loaded onto the aircraft in New York. The TWA caterer at John F. Kennedy International Airport is Ogden, according to a high-ranking Port Authority source.
Airline food normally is sealed but it is not X-rayed before being loaded, according to a source close to the investigation. The carts are sometimes stored on the plane and sometimes loaded along with the food. Carts brought on board are not X-rayed, but they are stored in a secure location.
Because only 230 passengers were flying on Flight 800 the night of July 17, only a quarter of the plane’s available cargo space was filled – meaning that the bins containing luggage were probably pushed to the forward area. At least one cargo bin has been recovered.
Large pieces of the plane have been recovered in recent days, including a front section of the passenger cabin with 15 windows, a 40-foot portion of aluminum skin from the left wing, a section of fuselage from the right side, and a 15-foot part of the left with its flap assembly in place, sources said.
Investigators at the Grumman hangar in Calverton, N.Y., are trying to piece the plane together using blueprints and a passenger seating chart. But progress has been slow given the lengthy recovery process and the extent of damage, said one source familiar with the investigation.
NTSB investigators are looking at structural damage, including whether fractures show evidence of soot or fatigue, while FBI investigators are conducting preliminary forensic tests and passing bits and pieces of evidence, from fiberglass flooring to aluminum skin, to the Washington lab.
“Every piece that has been looked at has either breakup or impact damage on it, from the largest to the smallest piece,” the source said. “It’s incredible. Everything is deformed and twisted and bent.”
Meanwhile, some involved in the investigation are frustrated at the pace as it goes into its third weekend. No more victims were recovered yesterday, keeping the total found at 184, and seven divers have suffered decompression sickness since the underwater search began, officials said.
Francis said yesterday, “I would hope we’re still going to recover significant numbers of victims.” However, he added they would probably not find all of the rest.
A village transformed; Community extends itself as crisis center for crash;
By Pamela Ferdinand and Karen Avenoso | July 20, 1996 for The Boston Globe
EAST MORICHES, N.Y.–Roland Penney pulled three bodies out of the water and into a borrowed motorboat the night TWA Flight 800 exploded over the sea.
The next day, Ayne Privitera opened her seven-bedroom waterfront home to American Red Cross volunteers. And John Zlatniski donated more than two dozen loaves of homemade bread to the Coast Guard and threw in free coffee with breakfast.
“In a tragedy like this, you don’t think of a few dollars,” said Zlatniski, the 61-year-old owner of John’s Hometown Bakery and Deli. “You think, ‘How can I help?’ ”
The crash transformed East Moriches, a tiny coastal village of shingled houses and fishing docks into an international crisis center. The shock of 230 lives wiped out and the loss of a local couple have bound residents together in grief and purpose, whether it is staying away from the crash site as requested or providing the supplies that thousands of investigators, rescue workers and others need to do their jobs.
There are those who would rather that the hubbub end, their streets cleared of police and media trucks, their privacy and quiet restored. But many others instinctively perform small deeds to ease the way for strangers.
Just 20 minutes from the Hamptons, East Moriches and its neighbor Center Moriches belong to the township of Brookhaven. Together, they have 16,000 residents. Unlike the estates along Dune Road in the Hamptons, only one of the houses that ends at a harbor has a locked gate. Locals describe themselves as closer knit and more middle class than the denizens of the Hamptons.
Until two days ago, residents thought of their town as sleepy. It is too small to have its own town hall, and a duck farm occupies several of its acres. The main roadway has just two lanes.
“We’ve dealt with small plane crashes, a few skydiving accidents,” said Robert Miglino, 37, a minibus driver. “Nobody expected to see anything like this in their lifetimes.”
Miglino said townspeople will need a long time to recover from the trauma. Those who witnessed the crash or assisted rescue efforts have little time now for their own grief.
Eric and Virginia Holst, a Manorville couple in their early 30s who were en route to the wedding of Eric Holst’s brother in France, died in the crash. Eric Holst had a dental practice here, and Virginia Holst’s mother attends a local church.
Many residents say they are almost as stunned by the onslaught of outsiders as by the crash. Fifty Coast Guard workers arrived from Boston and Cape Cod alone.
“The night it happened, it was bumper-to-bumper traffic – ambulances, police cars, all of a sudden, hundreds of people you’ve never seen before,” said Roscoe Francis, a 50-year-old volunteer firefighter for Center Moriches. “It was like Sunday morning when church gets out.”
The instant transformation has meant that dozens of satellite dishes from TV stations now spike the horizon, and Curtis Sliwa of the Guardian Angels conducts radio broadcasts from the harbor. Camouflaged military vehicles and refrigerated trucks containing body bags drive through the center of town. Rabbis enter this enclave of clapboard Catholic and Episcopal churches to deal with the bodies of Jewish victims, who must be buried as soon as possible under religious law.
Heroic and kind gestures from townspeople abound.
For Penney, 61, a deckside dinner picnic turned into a grueling night of trying to save lives. Penney and his son recovered the bodies of one male and two female victims, and towed them to a Coast Guard boat.
“It hit us when we got back home and thought about our own loved ones,” Penney said. “Now I’m thinking about all the families who will never find their relatives.”
At the Center Moriches fire station, scores of volunteer firefighters and EMT’s worked 40 hours straight, bolstered by local gifts of homebaked brownies and cake. Most of them took time off from full-time jobs to be here; one female volunteer said she was suspended from her job for five days for choosing to help in the rescue effort.
Meanwhile, Boulevard Florists arranged to deliver bouquet after bouquet to the Coast Guard deck. One note from a Las Vegas sender accompanied white lilies and read: “God bless all of you. May the Lord keep you in the palm of His hand.” Emily DeGroot, owner of the florist shop said, “If they wanted us to help with the rescue effort, we would close the store and go.”
Even the media has been welcomed warmly by residents unaccustomed to the glare of publicity. The town’s softball field is now a press parking lot, and home plate is covered with tire tracks. A local minibus company shuttles reporters to the Coast Guard command post, and charges nothing. Deli owners send donations by bicycle, and a local youth group has offered to haul garbage and pass out sandwiches.
But not everyone around here is a good Samaritan or happy host.
Mike DiGirolamo, who owns a boat company, said he has willingly abided by police requests to restrict rentals. But now his business is hurting. Boats idle in the marina, and his shack is deserted save for the decorative life-size sharks. “What are you going to do? People lost their lives,” he said. “But it’s getting kind of old.”
At one house near the Coast Guard station, residents have posted a wooden sign on their lawn: “Please. No Parking. No Interviews. No phone access. Thank you.”
Others tried to make the best of a bad situation and capitalize on the crowds. For instance, the DiSario brothers, two East Moriches teen-agers, hawked pretzels and drinks to the crowds.
When one customer complained that bottled water prices had risen to $ 2 from $ 1 the day before, 13-year-old Mike DiSario explained that the bottles were now bigger. Still, with a shrug, he accepted $ 1.
“I figured he seemed nice,” DiSario said, “and you got to help people out.”
Empty seats, full hearts: Flight 800 victims missed at Pa. school
By Pamela Ferdinand | August 28, 1996 for The Boston Globe
Montoursville, Pa.–Summer Seese will always remember her first day of high school as the time she could not look into her classmates’ eyes.
If it was difficult finding a homeroom and locating her locker in strange surroundings, then it was twice as hard mustering the courage to speak to kids still grieving yesterday for their brothers and sisters who died in the July 17 crash of TWA Flight 800.
“I pretty much wanted to get it all behind me, but it was real hard to pay attention,” Seese said as she walked home at the end of the day. “I was kind of scared to say, ‘Hi.’ Before, they were just normal students.”
The return to school and the rituals of the season almost restore life’s usual pattern to this borough in the Allegheny hills, cushioned by green rollercoaster ridges. The community lost 21 of its 5,000 residents in the crash, but now the black bunting on “Welcome to Montoursville” signs and satin blue-and-gold ribbons of mourning are finally coming down.
Yet routine is a poor substitute for rebirth. Girls in training bras reflect on death, boys too young to drive are scared of flying, and mothers leave the dinner table to sob at a child’s grave. Not even teachers have been able to immerse themselves in timeworn back-to-school traditions: washing blackboards and arranging schedules.
On the advice of crisis counselors, they blacked out the names of 16 students from used high school textbooks and attendance rolls, yearbook files and library cards. But administrative sleight of hand could not shield 800 pairs of sorrowful eyes from the empty seats and unclaimed lockers of absent friends. French Club members and five chaperones died on their way to Paris.
“We’re way too young to have to worry about this,” said Dana Smith, a 14-year-old who lost a close friend in the crash and entered Montoursville High School yesterday as a freshman. “I don’t want to curl up in a hole, but I’m never going to forget them. I’m just not.”
The school was scrubbed clean by the time its doors opened yesterday. Gone were the wreaths and sheets of handwritten condolences that filled the school entranceway like a funeral parlor.
David Burns, a lanky tenth-grader with close-cropped brown hair, made a point of avoiding the stairwell where he used to meet his friend Rance Hettler before gym. Hettler, a star football player for the Montoursville Warriors at age 18, had planned to attend Northeastern University in Boston this year. His number will be retired.
“He took me into his group, and we all went out and stuff. He just made my freshman year really fun,” said Burns, 15, smiling as he recalled Saturday nights at Perkins restaurant with his friend.
As yellow buses drove up to the high school’s arched entranceway in morning fog, pairs of students stole away for cigarettes, swinging brand-new knapsacks on shoulders and wearing stiff, white sneakers that needed a good breaking in.
They said it was a quieter opening day than usual and depressing to think of the people who weren’t there, of the homerooms that would fall a student short. The last funeral took place only two weeks ago, and one girl’s body is still missing. The day passed smoothly, but no one knew what to say to comfort saddened peers. Or how to cope with their own loss.
“I like my life right now because I have a lot of friends,” said Nathan Tillson, a 15-year-old sophomore. “The hardest part is watching other people missing their best friends.”
Like the girl who left a letter sealed in plastic on 17-year-old Amanda Karschner’s grave. She tucked it between pink roses and a teddy bear with a flowery bowtie and, if it was a clear day, she would have seen the high school’s spire from a hilltop corner where most of the students are buried.
Shade trees and a monument are planned, but for now typewritten cards on short metal stakes mark plots open to the sky and graced with trinkets — from a plastic dinosaur and canister of Gap perfume to a bracelet of crescent moon and stars.
“I still can’t imagine that you won’t be sitting with us at lunch or I won’t have you to talk to in the morning or we won’t be in any of the same classes or we won’t be going to any of the football games together or you won’t be playing basketball or track or that we won’t have our senior year together or that we won’t graduate together,” Amanda’s friend wrote. “I know everyone dies for a reason, but I can’t figure this one out.”
Teachers, too, felt their way through the first seven hours of the school year, trying to master an unwieldy situation without appearing cold-hearted. At a private counseling session Monday, they learned to avoid inadvertently saying words like “crash” and “explosive” to discourage pained students from blaming all their social and academic problems on the tragedy, and to watch for signs of trauma.
Each year, news magazine covers line the top of the blackboard in teacher Donald King’s social studies classroom, but none will illustrate TWA’s story this fall. He taught most of the kids who died, knew all of them, and anticipated his class would wait for him to say something.
“I will picture exactly where the kids sat and that has always happened when I’ve lost kids, but this is a megathing,” King said. “I won’t waste any time — that’s the worst thing you can do. I’ll discuss it and allow them to say or write whatever they want. It will be businesslike, and it will be loving.”
Chuck Bowman, the school’s football coach, brought a sports psychologist from the Pittsburgh Steelers to talk to his team when practice began several weeks ago.
“Rather than trying to force a kid to do something, you’ve got to pat him on the back and say, ‘We’ve got to get our heads back on the game,’” Bowman said. “We’re not as concentrated as we have been in the past, but we had no summer and I think the kids realize that it’s time to move on.”
It was a rough year for Montoursville parents even before the July 17 crash. A school bus ran over and killed a 7-year-old as he crossed the road. Then a teen-ager died in a car accident, and another shot himself to death.
Parents here grew up together and know each other well. If anyone is unwilling or unable to move forward with the start of school, it is they. As Bill Geiser, who manages the town cemetery and knows all of the families, put it, “Hell can’t be worse than this. It just can’t be.”
Several who lost children are also sending a sister or brother to college for the first time, a letting go of a different sort just when they felt the need to hold on tighter than ever. Amanda Karschner’s mother watched a younger daughter leave yesterday for classes in Montoursville, even as Cellini’s Submarine House began to look for someone to fill Amanda’s job.
“Now the kids are going back to school, and the cemetery is where we come,” she wailed as she sat on a wooden bench at the foot of her daughter’s grave Sunday night. “Like good parents, we said, ‘Sure, you can go to Paris.’ How could you tell a straight-A student she couldn’t go? It’s the only time I should have said, ‘No.’”
Mass. Jury Finds Au Pair Guilty In Baby’s Death; English Teenager Faces Life For Second-Degree Murder
By Pamela Ferdinand | October 31, 1997 for The Washington Post
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.–The English au pair accused of shaking a baby boy to death was found guilty of second-degree murder today by a Massachusetts jury, ending a three-week trial that transfixed observers on both sides of the Atlantic and evoked the fears of working parents everywhere.
A barely audible gasp of disbelief echoed in the stunned courtroom before Louise Woodward, 19, dissolved into sobs and crumpled in her seat. Susan Woodward, her hands shaking and her eyes rimmed with red, mouthed the word “unbelievable” to her husband, Gary, as their terrified daughter proclaimed her innocence.
“I didn’t do anything. I didn’t do anything, Daddy,” the teenager wailed. “How could they do that to me? . . . I didn’t do anything.”
Defense attorneys huddled around the young woman from a small village outside Liverpool, England, smoothing her auburn hair and rubbing her back to quiet the sobs. Relatives and friends, who have said they believe the au pair was convicted in the news media even before the trial began in the 9-month-old’s death, appeared to be in shock and shed few tears as they left the courtroom.
Sunil and Deborah Eappen, baby Matthew Eappen’s parents, chose not to attend the verdict announcement. They watched the verdict on television. Family members and their supporters sat on the opposite side of the courtroom and showed no expression when the verdict was delivered shortly after 9:30 p.m., after nearly 25 hours of deliberations.
Woodward will remain in custody until her sentencing Friday morning. She faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison with the possibility of parole after 15 years.
Defense lawyers were devastated by the verdict and said they plan to file a motion for the judge to reconsider the verdict and grant a new trial. “We are stunned by this verdict, mortified by this verdict,” defense lawyer Barry Scheck said tonight. “We will continue to fight.”
The trial, televised daily on Court TV, propelled the debate over working parents and child care into the national consciousness. The image of an inexperienced au pair allegedly shaking and then dropping a baby onto the floor painted a nightmarish scenario for working parents who entrust their children’s care to someone else and led to questions about whether the Eappens, both of whom are doctors, made wrong choices for their two sons.
Deborah Eappen, an ophthalmologist, works three days a week and received hate mail from people who argued she should have stayed at home; her husband, Sunil, is an anesthesiologist. Matthew died in his arms.
“I think there’s no doubt that what happened was not an accident,” Sunil Eappen said Wednesday night in a television interview with CBS’s Bryant Gumbel. “I can’t think about him more than a minute without breaking down.”
The case also generated doubts about the efficacy of the government-sponsored au pair program, which attracts thousands of young foreigners to the United States each year. Testimony in this most Irish of American cities polarized a local public wary of Woodward’s impassive demeanor and English viewers primed by O.J. Simpson’s televised trial and suspicious of the U.S. justice system. Cameras are banned from British courtrooms.
Earlier today, Woodward seemed calm and at times even cheery as she read letters from home. Her family refused to comment on the case, but their faces betrayed the strain of waiting for the verdict. The Eappens had not appeared in court since deliberations began several days ago, but their relatives and friends continued to congregate in an anteroom off Courtroom 12A wearing caterpillar-shaped lapel pins in honor of Matthew’s favorite toy, which played the song “You Are My Sunshine.”
To win a first-degree murder conviction against Woodward, prosecutors would have had to prove that the crime was committed with malice and forethought. The lesser charge of second-degree murder required proof only of malice.
Prosecutors tried to portray Woodward as a teenager with a visa to party and an “aspiring little actress” more interested in attending at least 20 performances of the Broadway musical “Rent” than in taking care of a colicky baby and his brother, who is now 3.
Middlesex Assistant District Attorney Gerard T. Leone contended that Woodward shook Matthew on the afternoon of Feb. 4 and then slammed his head against a hard surface to stop his incessant crying. Matthew lapsed into a coma and died five days later at Children’s Hospital in Boston as a result of a fractured skull and internal bleeding.
However, the defense team, paid for by EF Au Pair and led by former Simpson attorney Scheck, depicted Woodward as a young woman who balked at curfews and had broken house rules by talking on the phone more than five minutes each day but who was an innocent girl who loved children and would never do anything to harm her young charges.
When she testified, Woodward denied that she had forcibly shaken Matthew or thrown him to the ground out of frustration with his crying and her long working hours. She said Matthew frequently toppled over and may have struck his head when he stumbled near the steps of his play room a day before falling unconscious.
But Assistant District Attorney Martha Coakley said tonight there was no question that Matthew’s injuries had been inflicted and were no accident. Jurors had to sift through 116 exhibits and the statements of 37 witnesses ranging from neurosurgeons to forensic pathologists. They twice asked for excerpts from testimony that dealt with whether the baby’s head wound was old or new.
“The jury was able to see through the medical evidence that this child was harmed,” Coakley said. She added that Woodward had “maintained a denial of any kind of responsibility from the beginning.”
In Woodward’s home town of Elton, England, villagers who gathered in a pub at 3 a.m. to hear the verdict cried and screamed in disbelief.
“She’s incapable of an act of cruelty like that,” Hazel Mayamba-Kasongo told CNN. “This is unacceptable.”
“She was very quiet and very genuine,” Kate Hagan, 19 and Woodward’s best friend during their high school years, was quoted by the Associated Press as saying. “She could not have done this.”
A similar case nearly two years ago in Loudoun County, Va., involving a Dutch au pair charged with shaking to death a newborn ended in a mistrial.
Candidate’s Life: Bullets and Batter to Bread and Butter; Jacqueline Bevins Knew the Gun Was Loaded and Voters Still Forgave Her
By Pamela Ferdinand | April 14, 1999 for The Washington Post
OGUNQUIT, Maine–Nine years ago, Jacqueline Bevins shot her husband 15 times as he stepped out of the bathtub, reloading her pistol twice. She was charged with murder, but her lawyer argued wife battering as a defense, and a jury acquitted her.
When it was over, Bevins never closed the doors of her seaside restaurant to muffle the whispers and gossip, and she never stopped speaking her mind. Instead, she constructed a new life out of the shards of her old one. And any doubt in her community’s capacity to let bygones be bygones was put to rest April 3–nine years to the day after the murder–when Bevins was elected to the five-member board of selectmen that governs Ogunquit.
“What she did yesterday has no bearing on what she does tomorrow,” said Robert Cammarota, a local restaurant owner and friend. “The past is the past.”
Bevins, now a 58-year-old grandmother, declined comment after winning one of three open spots. She received 236 votes out of 541 cast to fill a two-year, $ 1,000-a-year position.
Turnout at the first board meeting, held last week in a community center basement, could not have filled a 12-person jury box. With a small pair of black-rimmed glasses poised atop her head, Bevins asked questions on code enforcement and liquor licenses and seemed shyly at ease in her new role.
“The woman has got grit,” said fellow selectman Karen Maxwell. “She knows better than anybody that there was more talk behind her back than to her face, and that’s got to be a hard life to lead.”
Perhaps voters deliberately weighed Bevins’s traumatic past in making their decision. Most likely, locals say, they cast ballots with bread-and-butter issues such as electric bills and sidewalk construction in mind.
“She’s very interested in the welfare of the town and its betterment, so even if she was Lizzie Borden, she would still get in,” said Richard Perkins, a friend and restaurant owner.
Last year, an Ogunquit electoral candidate who died one day after ballots were printed came in second. Some now remark how fitting it is that a town that served as the setting for Stephen King novels has an acquitted killer on its board.
Bevins has told others that she lies awake at night reliving the shooting, wondering if it could have been avoided. “I’ve felt isolated, doing my own form of punishment,” she said in an interview with the Portland Press Herald. “I think the town has accepted me for who I am, a very fair and honest person.”
Memories run deep in close-knit communities, and Ogunquit (motto: “A Beautiful Place by the Sea”) is no exception. This southern Maine town, 15 miles from former president George Bush’s Kennebunkport estate, covers four square miles and has an estimated 1,200 year-round residents, many of them retirees. Summer attracts tens of thousands more to a sandy white beach, an art colony and an active gay and lesbian community.
Jackie’s Too, the well-known restaurant still owned by Bevins, sits on the edge of Perkins Cove. On one side of the cove lies a working harbor crossed by New England’s only foot drawbridge. On the other side stands a coastline as rocky as Jackie and John Bevins’s marriage.
By all accounts, John Bevins was a bigger-than-life businessman and reputed playboy with a penchant for flashy cars and shady dealings. They met in a Massachusetts restaurant where she waitressed, then fell in love and moved in 1975 to Maine, settling in a stylish house in nearby town of York, according to an account in the Press Herald.
Friends say Jackie became a worker bee, turning a deli-style cafe into a full-service restaurant. Court records show John, two years older, ran a cement company in the Cayman Islands. As their relationship deteriorated, so did her physical and emotional state. She suffered depression, gained weight and began seeing a psychiatrist, records show. A medical report gave evidence of multiple bruises on her body.
When John Bevins finally asked for a divorce, according to court testimony, his angry wife told a friend: “I’m afraid of what I’m going to do. I’m afraid I’m gonna blow him away.”
On April 3, 1990, he was dead, and Bevins had checked herself into the psychiatric unit of Maine Medical Center. During the trial, prosecutors said she had no right to kill her husband, even if she was battered. Defense attorney Daniel Lilley argued, however, that she feared for her life.
“I don’t think she’s any different from someone who has come back from a war and taken lives of the enemy. It was a ‘kill or be killed’ situation,” Lilley said in a recent interview. “The guy had done everything to this woman, and it was time to stop.”
Public support for Bevins was widespread even then, with dozens of letters flooding into court. “She has always impressed me as a very kind person with a hard exterior who is always sympathetic toward those less fortunate than herself,” one person wrote. Another added, “Jacqueline Bevins is a person about whom it is impossible not to have an opinion.”
Local residents say that sentiment holds true today, years after the murder.
Publicly, many people laud Bevins for her kindness and civic contributions. For nearly two decades, she has served as a community volunteer and appointed member of several town boards. Friends say she serves hot chocolate to children at the annual Christmas tree lighting, brings magazines to prisoners at the York County Jail, and supports employees and business owners with supplies and money in times of need.
Still, there are those who privately wonder if Bevins should have paid a higher price for shooting her husband. Most women who kill their abusers do so during violent episodes, national domestic violence data show, and the vast majority of women charged with killing their batterers are found guilty.
“I’m sure there are some residents who feel she got away with it,” said former police chief William Hancock, who worked here at the time of the murder. “Well, she did.”
Same-Sex Couples Take Vows as Law Takes Effect; Across Vermont, Dozens Celebrate Civil Union
Pamela Ferdinand | July 2, 2000 for The Washington Post
BRATTLEBORO, Vt.–Under a quilt of stars, as friends and family blew bubbles and kisses into the warm night air, Kathleen Peterson and Carolyn Conrad exchanged vows of love and commitment this morning and became the first same-sex couple in the nation to be recognized as civil union partners under Vermont’s far-reaching law, which took effect today.
Town Clerk Annette Cappy opened her office here at the stroke of midnight to accommodate the Brattleboro couple, who immediately cemented their five-year relationship by obtaining a civil union license and the blessing of a justice of the peace. As of midnight, a state government was allowed for the first time to bestow on gay couples virtually the same benefits and responsibilities heterosexual married partners have, from taxes to medical decision-making. (Federal benefits are not included.)
One bride, Peterson, 41, a ski-lift electrician, wore black. The other bride, Conrad, 29, an associate dean of students at Marlboro College, held a bouquet of garden flowers and stood barefoot in a shimmery taupe sheath with matching nail polish as the town clerk verified their license information and cameras flashed around them. As they signed their names, friends, relatives and supportive strangers counted down from 10 to 1. “Happy union!” they yelled, with whistles and a lone cry of “Brava!”
Arms around each other’s waists, the couple strode out of town hall to a park, joyfully oblivious to the group of young Rutland Church of Christ protesters in the lobby with bowed heads and placards reading, “SIN is a disgrace to any people” and “His blood is for you.” White votive candles lined a marble fountain outside where a friend sang, intimate vows were exchanged and the women were officially declared joined in civil union.
“Where is that sparkling cider?” Conrad shouted, laughing, as more than 100 well-wishers burst into applause. As the significance of the event sank in, she said, “This is more than I ever thought I’d see in my lifetime.”
This celebratory scenario played out in endless variations in churches and gardens, back yards and homes, throughout a state where being the first–as in the first to abolish slavery–is often a source of pride.
Several dozen same-sex couples were expected to forge civil unions today in mostly private ceremonies that promise to mark a new standard for gay rights nationwide and the end, at least for now, of an emotional and divisive debate here.
The landmark legislation, which prominently defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman, won passage in April after the state Supreme Court found that gay couples were being unconstitutionally denied the benefits of marriage.
Ordered to seek a remedy, legislators created civil unions despite the fact that 32 other states have laws restricting marriage to heterosexual couples and Congress allows states not to recognize same-sex “marriages” performed elsewhere. South Dakota recently strengthened an existing law banning gay marriage. And late Friday, the chief policymaking body of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) voted narrowly to recommend barring its ministers from officiating at commitment ceremonies for gay couples.
“Through this law, Vermont becomes a pioneer for families and equality,” Evan Wolfson, a lawyer for the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, told the Associated Press.
“Americans will see that when lesbians and gay men are given access to most of the rights and obligations of civil marriage, the sky will not fall and the institution of marriage will be even stronger,” Wolfson said.
State Rep. William Lippert Jr. (D), the only openly gay member of the Vermont legislature, agreed. “It’s exciting to look ahead and realize that young people growing up now will have a new model of what’s possible in terms of committed and loving relationships between two members of the same sex,” he said. “That after July 1, 2000, things will never be the same.”
Of the three couples that filed suit seeking equal rights, only one–Lois Farnham, 55, and Holly Puterbaugh, 54–picked up a license today. Nina Beck and Stacy Jolles, who already had a Jewish “wedding” in California, may get theirs in the fall. Peter Harrigan and Stan Baker, partners for seven years, will apply for one this week. But Farnham and Puterbaugh couldn’t wait.
“I think it’s about time, after 27 1/2 years. That’s long enough,” said Farnham, with Puterbaugh outside the South Burlington town clerk’s office. “It’s nice after all this time to call Holly my spouse.”
The majority of Vermonters are believed to oppose gay marriage, and how they will receive newly “civil unionized” compatriots remains to be seen.
For every person like Kate Millbrook of Brownsville, who believes it “won’t amount to a hill of beans, for crying out loud,” there is someone else like Kathleen Welch of Tunbridge, who resigned Friday as assistant town clerk, along with her boss, rather than issue the licenses. “It’s immoral,” she said.
Opponents held a peaceful rally on the State House lawn in Montpelier, after draping a banner reading “Take Back Vermont, Protect Our Children” over the steps, and some clergy refused to preside over civil unions. A court case to invalidate the law is pending, and state Rep. Nancy Sheltra has formed a political action committee to help defeat pro-civil union legislators in November.
“As a Christian woman, I believe this is really an abomination to God,” she said. “I never thought this would happen in my state.”
Under civil union rules, once a license is issued, it must be certified by a judge, justice of the peace or ordained clergy member and returned to the town clerk. Each license costs $ 20; a copy is $ 7. Local same-sex couples must obtain their license in the town where one partner resides. Out-of-state couples may apply anywhere, but their rights evaporate as soon as they cross the border.
For Thomas Lang, 37, and Alexander Westerhoff, 31, antiques dealers from Massachusetts, civil union meant more than an opportunity to achieve symbolic recognition of their nearly 13-year relationship. With highly politicized vows read before reporters and television cameras at a Brattleboro park at 1 a.m. today, they knew it also represented a chance to send a message back home.
“We have a long fight ahead of us in the state of Massachusetts to see these rights and these freedoms,” Lang said. “We need to take this seriously.”
Other ceremonies did not carry such heavy political weight, although the disappointment of not being married in the fullest sense was always implied. After picking up their license in Hartland, north of here, Declan Buckley, 44, of New Hampshire, and his partner, Kevin Gato, 38, exchanged vows and plain white gold bands at the First Universalist Church before a small gathering of friends and photographers, including a television crew from Japan.
Pink, yellow and violet roses perfumed the service as clergy spoke of sacred unity, friendship, and the expanse and limits of love. “Declan, do you take this man to be your lawfully wedded partner in civil union?” asked the justice. “I do,” Buckley replied. Said Gato, “Boy, do I.”
Church bells pealed minutes later as Buckley lifted his new civil union partner for a piggyback ride to their truck, where heart-shaped “Just Married” balloons flapped from the roof.
“It’s more than I ever expected,” Gato said, as giddy as any newlywed. “I feel like the king of the world.”
The Great Wedding Gown Grab; At Filene’s Basement, A Bridal Free-for-All
By Pamela Ferdinand | February 22, 2001 for The Washington Post
BOSTON–Here come the brides, all 500 of them, dressed in bluejeans and sneakers. Pumped with adrenaline, they stand prepared to knock the glass doors of Filene’s Basement off their hinges — it’s happened four or five times before — to score The Perfect Dress in the biggest bridal sale scrum of the season.
In front is Teddi Tourine, 23, who drove here overnight from Centreville. Her mother, Joanne, and a family friend came on board in New Jersey, and no one has caught a wink of shut-eye since they arrived at 3:30 a.m., checked into an elegant downtown hotel and staked their places at the head of the line before sunrise.
From where she stands outside the bargain store’s locked basement entrance, Tourine can catch the merest shimmer of opalescent pearl and white tulle wrapped in plastic zippered bags and hanging from scores of clothing racks inside. It’s enough to make a girl crazy knowing that 1,400 wedding gowns here — some designer labels originally worth thousands of dollars — are all priced at $ 249 a pop.
“This is almost as hard as trying to pick a husband,” Tourine will say later, a mound of discarded satin and lace at her feet.
For more than half a century, Filene’s Basement has made fantasies come true with its “Bridal Event,” the ultimate one-day marriage markdown challenge. The store, which is no longer associated with Filene’s itself and does not provide alterations or regularly stock wedding gowns, collects surplus inventory from stores and manufacturers nationwide. It runs the sale three times a year at its Downtown Crossing location here.
Not every gown sells, but the store makes a profit, and this day is as much about tradition as price. “Locust-style” is how two local college professors studying shoppers’ behavior aptly described the initial onslaught of Mad Max Cinderellas who empty the racks within one minute. One minute. Wiped clean.
“You’d think it was food,” said one woman, prowling the aisles in black biker shorts and a white satin push-up bra.
The key is to grab as many dresses as possible and then deal with the consequences, bartering them for what you want. Years ago the gowns used to be sorted by size, but it quickly became clear that no one has time for such scrutiny during the initial charge.
The smart women bring an entourage, with each person assigned to grab half a dozen dresses at a time and sit on them, if necessary, to prevent pilfering. Then, before you can say, “I do,” the brides-to-be strip down to their skivvies and parade before mirrors in beaded sheaths and ribboned trains, floral corsets and flouncy skirts that drag across the scuffed linoleum floor.
Tourine came prepared with a black bathing suit under her clothing. Her fiance proposed to her on his knees on the Jersey Shore after Fourth of July fireworks, and their wedding is scheduled for June 2002. Tourine wants a sheath dress with tiny straps and not a lot of “froufrou.” So, apparently, do dozens of other women.
“This is a little heavy for June, but it’s got a simple line,” says Tourine’s mother, offering up a satin gown with beaded trim and a skirt stiff enough to stand on its own.
“Whoa, this makes my butt look really big,” the bride pouts, not even bothering to look in a mirror. “I feel like a lampshade.”
“Honey, that face,” says Joanne Tourine. “That’s not the one you want. When your face lights up, that’s the one you want.”
The grabs made, the dresses surveyed, the storewide trading and stalking begins. Near the “Ladies Swimwear” sign, a coalition has formed. Margaret LeJeune, a 25-year-old visual-arts teacher who drove here last night with her fiance and two friends from Rochester, N.Y., wants a “saucy” ivory dress with a Spanish flair that shows some skin. Another bride, whose girlfriends wear matching red baseball caps for easy reconnaissance, is looking for something a little fancier.
There’s no conflict of interest, so they’ve piled everything in the middle, and the stack is soon whittled down. Three hours later, LeJeune is getting frustrated.
“I’m waiting for the one I put on to say, ‘This is the dress,’ ” she says. But so far, the selection has been “gross.” “They’re gaudy. They’re overdone. Way too much tulle.”
Her fiance has been busy videotaping the event, and exhaustion soon sends another friend under a pile of gowns to sleep. Meanwhile, a man who tried to reorganize the line outside (“This is a female thing,” the women shouted in protest before the doors opened) has taken on the persona of a used-car salesman to find his daughter the right size. She flew into town yesterday from Fort Lauderdale.
“Three 12s and a 16 for a 14! You can’t fake that deal!” yells Gene Porcaro, a New Yorker in his fifties. “I’ve got to get a 14 now!”
Meanwhile, in her space underneath the escalator, Tourine has a glimmer of hope. A sparkle of pearls on a simple sheath happened to catch this reporter’s eye, and it’s a winner. The only choice left is whether she should get it in white or ivory. Ivory, it’s decided.
“I really like that one, but can I look around once more?” she asks her mother gingerly. “I’m starting to get obsessed.”
A Historian’s Embellished Life; Joseph Ellis Took Meticulous Care With Facts — Except His Own Story
By Pamela Ferdinand | June 23, 2001 for The Washington Post
SOUTH HADLEY, Mass.–Mount Holyoke College Professor Joseph J. Ellis, a beloved instructor and acclaimed author, made his name for impeccable scholarship on the back of historical truth. With an eye for the telling detail and unsparing research reflected in hundreds of footnotes and references throughout his work, he rose to national prominence with his 1997 biography of Thomas Jefferson, which won the National Book Award, and his latest bestseller, “Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation,” which won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for history.
Ellis, at 57, was clearly a man at the top of his game: A happily married father of three, a tenured professor at one of the top all-women’s colleges, where students clamored to enroll in his history courses, and a winner of two top literary prizes in the past four years alone. His job was to tell it like it was. Yet for reasons perhaps unknown even to himself, Ellis could not resist telling his own life the way he wanted it to be.
Mount Holyoke College officials this week announced they will investigate admissions by Ellis that he deceived his students — as well as his family and colleagues — into believing he served in Vietnam. Allegations against the renowned historian first appeared Monday in a Boston Globe front-page article, which reported that he had long made false claims about his wartime service and that he also embellished other aspects of his life, including his involvement in anti-war and civil rights movements in the 1960s.
Last night in Washington, Ellis made a brief statement about his ordeal before delivering a lecture on his new book at the National Archives:
“When I agreed several weeks ago to be here tonight, I had no idea how difficult this occasion would be. As you know there’s been a great deal of media attention in recent days on my own personal failings. And I once again want to repeat that I deeply regret having let stand and later confirmed any assumption that I served in Vietnam. After fulfilling tonight’s commitment to the National Archives, my focus will be — must be — on my family as well as on my own personal shortcomings.”
The revelation has shaken Mount Holyoke, a close-knit community of roughly 2,000 students in the heart of the Connecticut Valley, and astonished academics nationwide who are now left to pick over questions of professional ethics and personal psychology. Re[acute]sume[acute] padding is nothing new, but history as a vocation is widely perceived as a moral cut above politics or business in its mission to uncover the truth.
“This is quite unique,” said Arnita Jones, executive director of the American Historical Association in Washington, whose ethical guidelines posit “intellectual honesty” as a primary responsibility of professors. “History teachers generally have a very high regard for the truth. That’s what they spend their lives pursuing.”
The Globe did not question the integrity of Ellis’s scholarship. As one of the nation’s foremost early American history scholars, Ellis has published a wide array of articles and books and delivered numerous public lectures. In his nearly 30 years at Mount Holyoke, he has served as dean of faculty and history department chairman, helping to recruit respected faculty such as former national security adviser Anthony Lake.
Acting on an anonymous tip, however, Globe reporter Walter V. Robinson found that Ellis embroidered the truth in and out of classrooms at Mount Holyoke and nearby Amherst College. So consistent, though seemingly sparing, was the deception that not even his wife knew until now that her husband did not serve in Vietnam, said one college source.
In a 1997 Globe interview to publicize the Jefferson biography, Ellis told the reporter he was considering writing a book about the year 1965 — the same year he was in Vietnam. Last year, while promoting “Founding Brothers,” Ellis told another reporter, Mark Feeney, that he was a platoon leader in Vietnam. Compared to being in ROTC, he said, “They did pay an extra $ 110 a month, and if you’re going to do it, you might as well do it.”
Feeney recalled how Ellis detailed time spent at Gen. William C. Westmoreland’s headquarters in Saigon and how the general had half a dozen sets of fatigues freshly laundered and starched each day. Ellis mentioned discussing his service with author David Halberstam, who told the New York Times he has no recollection of such a talk.
When Ellis asked him to downplay his experience in Vietnam, Feeney said he interpreted the request as modesty.
Ellis wrote at least two articles for The Washington Post. In one, he referred in passing to “my military experience in the Vietnam War.” In another piece in 1999, he took historian Edmund Morris to task for using fiction as a technique in a supposedly nonfiction biography of Ronald Reagan. “It was almost too good to be true,” Ellis wrote. “Well, since history is almost always too good to be true, I should have known better.”
His penchant for stretching the truth extended to the classroom, said students who recalled that Ellis related personal experiences in his popular Vietnam and American Culture course. Angel Kozeli, 24, who graduated from Mount Holyoke last year and attended his 20th Century U.S. Foreign Policy class, said Ellis claimed his unit was near My Lai shortly before the massacre of 1968. The firsthand account, although short on specifics, lent his seminar gravitas and heightened her respect for him, she said.
“I recall this ominous silence when he said that,” she said. “I know what was on my mind was, ‘Wow, how does a man live with that? He’s been there.’ ”
She was stunned to hear otherwise: “I find myself saying, ‘Why, Joe? You had all the credentials.’ ”
Ellis may have regaled students with war exploits, but military records show he never left the East Coast, according to the Globe. He served in ROTC at William and Mary, then enrolled in graduate school at Yale from 1965 through 1969 before teaching history at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. He was discharged from the Army in 1972 as a captain, the Globe reported. (Ellis graduated in the Class of 1961 from Gonzaga College High School in D.C., according to Joe Reyda, director of special events at the high school. He was on the honor roll throughout his four years )
Robinson, head of the Globe’s investigative team, said the Boston newspaper had no choice but to publish its findings, given Ellis’s growing stature. (The Globe banished columnist Mike Barnicle for shoddy reporting and columnist Patricia Smith for fabricating stories.)
“Ellis was not maybe on the same rung as [historian David] McCullough, but he was certainly getting there,” Robinson said. “We almost expect to be deceived by our politicians, but for our children in the classroom, we want and still expect much more.”
Mount Holyoke President Joanne V. Creighton, who initially defended Ellis, announced later this week that the college would investigate the allegations. Mount Holyoke has a strict honor code among its students, who are allowed to take self-scheduled exams in unmonitored rooms.
“Misleading students in the classroom is a serious academic matter, and claiming service in Vietnam falsely is disrespectful, especially to all who have served,” she said in a letter to the editor, which cited the college’s “commitment to the highest standards of academic integrity.”
So close is the faculty that one of Ellis’s longtime friends compared the shock to discovering a spouse had led a double life. Another saddened friend said Ellis, known for his principled nature and good humor, was in tremendous pain, and it was premature to discuss any consequences of his alleged actions. The average salary for a full-time professor is $ 94,000 a year.
“He’s probably wondering how he could have messed up so badly,” Donal O’Shea, the dean of faculty, said yesterday. “He cares so deeply about students. I find it hard to believe he was deliberately misleading them.”
“We’re all a bit shell-shocked,” agreed Christopher Pyle, a politics professor who has known Ellis for 25 years. “There is a strong sense in this community that we should not rush to judgment.”
Ellis decided this week that he will no longer teach his Vietnam and American Culture course. Last night, the lecture room at the National Archives was standing room only with about 100 historians, students and buffs and half a dozen reporters. Archives staff would not let reporters approach Ellis, who signed books afterward, and he brushed past reporters when he was done signing. The books were on sale for $ 21.
The audience seemed forgiving. They laughed heartily at jokes he made during the one-hour address, and gave him strong applause. “I think we all make mistakes, and the most important thing is how Professor Ellis lives the rest of his life, and I wish him well,” said Ed Raines, a historian employed by the U.S. Army.
“It’s sort of like President Bill [Clinton],” said Raoul Kulberg, a history buff and retired university librarian. “How could someone that smart do something that dumb? I don’t think it diminishes his scholarship any more than I think Clinton’s peccadilloes diminish his achievements as president.”
Ellis is hardly the only exalted person to have felt the effects of fib-telling. Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden was forced to give up his presidential bid after plagiarizing remarks. U.S. chief of naval operations Jeremy Boorda killed himself rather than face allegations that he wore undeserved decorations.
Most recently, a University of Oklahoma professor apologized for lying to students about being a Navy SEAL. And a California Superior Court judge was recently found by a state panel to have falsely claimed to be a CIA agent and lied about his Vietnam war exploits to get appointed to the bench, according to news reports. His lawyers invoked an epidemic worthy of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel: Pseudologica fantastica, which causes a deliberate mixing of fact with fiction to protect self-esteem.
Some of Ellis’s colleagues said that he made self-deprecating remarks and often seemed vulnerable, and more than one fellow scholar has noted the parallels to Thomas Jefferson, the subject of Ellis’s award-winning biography titled “American Sphinx.”
In the book, Ellis compared himself to Jefferson, another man who learned how to disguise insecurities. He noted the third president’s “psychological agility, his capacity to play hide-and-seek within himself” and “his quite remarkable powers of deception and denial.”
Jefferson exhibited the kind of duplicity, said Ellis, that is “possible only in the purest of heart.”
Staff writer David Montgomery in Washington contributed to this report.
At Logan Airport, Nobody Saw Plane’s Sharp Turn South
By Hanna Rosin and Pamela Ferdinand | September 11, 2001 for The Washington Post
BOSTON–American Airlines Flight 11 began routinely, in every way.
At 6 a.m., pilot John Ogonowski left his wife and three daughters asleep in their farm house in Dracut, Mass., and headed for Boston’s Logan Airport. He had flown the Boston-to-Los Angeles route for three years, every couple of weeks, so he was used to getting up early.
On his way, he drove by his uncle Al’s house and tooted the horn, the requisite family greeting in a town sprinkled with Ogonowskis.
About an hour later, he reached the plane, which had been at the airport since the night before.
Like most morning flights in late summer, Flight 11 left nearly on time, at 7:59 a.m., with little notice or incident — one of 220 flights that took off from Boston between 7 and 9 a.m. today.
The plane was less than half full; its 81 passengers filed onto the Boeing 767 from Terminal B along with nine flight attendants. Ogonowski and co-pilot Tom McGuinness were already on board.
Flight 11 began on its normal path from Boston west toward central New York, radar shows. But about a half-hour into the flight, around the time flight attendants would have been serving drinks, the passengers must have known something was wrong.
Somewhere near Albany, the plane took a sharp turn and headed south, following the course of the Hudson River straight to downtown New York City.. It had been hijacked by terrorists armed with knives, Attorney General John D. Ashcroft said.
About 8:45 a.m. the plane became the first of two aircraft to crash into the World Trade Center, smashing into the North Tower. At that moment Cathy Carron, 50, was two blocks away at the American Stock Exchange. She looked up and saw a huge, low-flying plane bank into the side of the World Trade Center.
Then she saw chaos, random bits of debris — chunks of fuselage, a Louis Vuitton bag, papers fluttering to the ground. Then blinding smoke, people running from the building, screaming.
Boston airport officials said they did not spot the plane’s course until it had crashed, and said the control tower had no unusual communication with the pilots or any crew members.
But a source said a crew member aboard the flight had called American Airlines’ operation center in Fort Worth to report that something was going on. The airline would not confirm that report.
Sometime before 11 a.m., federal aviation officials showed up at the houses of both pilots — Ogonowski’s in Dracut and McGuinness’s in Portsmouth, N.H., to notify their families. They were soon followed by clergy.
Outside Ogonowski’s colonial-style house, the pilot’s brother, Jim, and a friend struggled to lower a military-size flag. They also put up an 8-by-10 portrait of John, a boyish 50-year-old, sandy haired, smiling, his face reddened from farm work.
His wife, Margaret, an American Airlines flight attendant, and his three daughters, Laura, 16, Caroline, 14, and Mary Catherine, 11, stayed inside the house all afternoon.
Jim Ogonowski came out to the fieldstone fence and spoke to reporters gathered there.
“Take a good look at the beauty around you; that’s John’s legacy,” he said, spreading his arms to take in the 150-acre farm. He explained how his brother had spent his life working to preserve this patch of farmland in a town that was quickly turning suburban.
“I keep looking at the cornfields behind me, hoping my brother will come walking out,” he said.
Several friends came walking up the road to visit the family.
“I used to tell him: You’d never catch me flying,” said Mitchell Pietryka, who did part-time work for him. “He’d tell me, ‘It’s the safest thing in the world.’ ”
In Portsmouth, two pastors were with McGuinness’s wife, Cheryl, when she was notified about her husband’s death. She and her two children, a 14-year-old son and a 16-year-old daughter, survived him.
More than 800 people, including several pilots who lived in the area, attended a special prayer service at Bethany Church in Greenland, N.H., where McGuinness was a longtime member. “He was a man of God, a loving husband and father,” said Rick Dekoven, an administrator at the church.
Rosin reported from Washington, Ferdinand from Boston.
Would-Be Shoe Bomber Gets Life Term; Al Qaeda Member Shouts at Judge
By Pamela Ferdinand | January 30, 2003 for The Washington Post
Richard C. Reid, the British drifter and Muslim fundamentalist who attempted to detonate bombs in his shoes during a transatlantic flight, today was sent to prison for life as the first admitted member of al Qaeda sentenced in the United States since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
Reid, 29, remained defiant, describing himself as a soldier of war and denouncing U.S. policies against Muslim nations as justification for his attempted downing of American Airlines Flight 63 in December 2001. Nearly 200 passengers and crew members were aboard the Paris-to-Miami flight.
In a dramatic climax to the two-hour proceeding, Reid was muscled out of the courtroom in handcuffs by four federal marshals after shouting at U.S. District Court Judge William G. Young. Young had concluded the sentencing with a stern defense of his decision to put Reid behind bars for life without possibility of parole.
“We are not afraid of any of your terrorist co-conspirators, Mr. Reid. We are Americans. We have been through the fire before,” the judge said. “You are not an enemy combatant — you are a terrorist. You are not a soldier in any war — you are a terrorist.”
Young asked Reid to take note of an American flag above their heads, saying it would fly for many years to come. Then, ordering a marshal to take Reid away, the judge said, “Custody, Mr. Officer. Stand him down.”
Reid, partially shaven with straggly hair falling to his shoulders and a goatee, stood up immediately to his full, imposing height of 6-foot-4 and pointed at the judge. Several of the crew members and passengers who were on the flight looked stunned, glancing at each other and shaking their heads. One woman cried.
“That flag will be brought down on the day of judgment and you will see in front of your Lord and my Lord and then we will know,” Reid said, in a heavily accented, rapid-fire cadence. “You will be judged by Allah.”
When he pleaded guilty in October, Reid pledged his support to al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and declared himself an enemy of the United States. He declared that allegiance again today in a federal courthouse surrounded by bomb-sniffing dogs and armed federal agents.
“Your government has sponsored the torture of Muslims in Iraq and Turkey and Jordan and Syria with their money and their weapons,” Reid said. “I am at war with your country.”
Federal officials praised the tough sentence as a step forward in the war against terrorism. Reid was sentenced on eight charges, including attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction and attempted murder.
“The sentence sends a strong message not only to Richard Reid, but to others who harbor hate and are committed to violence against the United States,” said U.S. Attorney Michael Sullivan. “The court made it perfectly clear that there is going to be no tolerance in our system of justice for those wanting to commit crimes of hate against innocent people.”
Owen Walker, one of Reid’s federal public defenders, declined to comment.
But in court filings, defense attorneys characterized Reid as a troubled man motivated by a desire to defend Islam, which he credited with saving him from a life of petty crime and drugs. Walker said today in court that there was no malice or hatred in his client’s sentiments.
“There are millions of Americans who have anti-American views,” Walker said.
The judge retorted: “They don’t go around trying to blow up planes.”
Reid’s case was one of several highly publicized cases in the aftermath of the attacks. Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person in the United States accused as a conspirator in the attacks, is scheduled to stand trial next June in U.S. District Court in Alexandria unless he is turned over to the U.S. military as an enemy combatant. John Walker Lindh, the suburban Californian who had traveled to Afghanistan to study Islam, received 20 years in prison in October after pleading guilty to supplying services to the Taliban. He was not, however, charged with conspiring to kill Americans.
In the year since the “shoe bomb” episode, more than a dozen individuals who frequented Reid’s haunts in London and Paris have been arrested. Last week, French authorities charged two suspected Islamic militants with links to terror groups; one of them, Karim Bourti, had been interrogated last year about his ties to Reid. And earlier this month, British police raided the London mosque where Reid worshiped before moving to Afghanistan and Pakistan in 1997.
Prosecutors said Reid’s scheme unraveled about 90 minutes into Flight 63, as the plane soared over the North Atlantic. Passengers and crew members overpowered Reid, tying him to his window seat and sedating him after a flight attendant noticed him futilely trying to light a fuse protruding from one of his high-top hiking boots. Police and the FBI later said the plastic explosives in Reid’s shoes were powerful enough to rip a hole in the fuselage of the Boeing 767.
“We have no reason to believe that Richard Reid remains anything but a dedicated enemy of this country, ready to attack Americans and their interests,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Gerard T. Leone Jr. told the judge.
One of the flight attendants, Carole Nelson, also asked the judge to impose a life sentence. As she described how fearful children on the flight huddled together, she briefly glanced at Reid.
“I believe that Richard Reid was on a mission of evil, a mission of destruction and a mission of murder,” she said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
