TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/072489/07248900.037

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 4KB | 69 lines

NATION, Page 21

A Bizarre and Suspicious Flight

After 800 miles, a crash, a swim and a gun wound


    All seemed well when Washington lawyer Thomas Root, 36, climbed
into a Cessna 210 Centurion and took off from National Airport at
6:33 a.m. Thursday. He often piloted himself on business trips, and
the 156-mile jaunt to Rocky Mount, N.C., that his flight plan
called for appeared routine. Two hours into his trip, however --
and some 45 minutes after he was expected to land -- Root radioed
the Federal Aviation Administration at Leesburg, Va., that he was
suffering chest pains and having difficulty breathing.

    As his plane crossed North Carolina and headed south over the
Atlantic, it picked up a small convoy of escorting military craft
that tried to make radio contact but failed. Root appeared to have
suffered a heart attack; pilots saw him sprawled in the Cessna's
cockpit, apparently unconscious. For almost four hours the Cessna
droned over the Atlantic on automatic pilot at about 10,000 ft.
Finally, it ran out of fuel 15 miles from the Bahamian island of
Eleuthera and some 800 miles from Washington. It spiraled on a
sharp angle into the sea and sank within six minutes.

    Then came what seemed a miracle. Four medics who had been
following the flight for its last hour aboard an Air Force C-130
cargo plane parachuted into the ocean, expecting at most to recover
a body. To their amazement, they saw Root swimming toward them.
Coast Guard Captain Dr. James Rahman later theorized that carbon
monoxide leaking into the Cessna's cabin caused Root to pass out
but that the crash revived him.

    He was bleeding from the abdomen and had fractured ribs,
injuries presumed to have been caused by the crash. Root was flown
to a hospital in Hollywood, Fla., where he was reported first in
critical, then in stable condition. Wife Kathy, 35, sent him a
tongue-in-cheek message: "Root, you really did it this time."

    But on Friday Hollywood police chief Richard Witt made a
startling report. Exploratory surgery had led doctors to conclude
that Root's injuries resulted from a gunshot wound -- apparently
inflicted in the air and at such close range that a powder burn
surrounded the entrance hole.

    After quizzing Root for 40 minutes, Andrew Alston, an
investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board, said the
pilot admitted keeping a .32-cal. revolver in his plane's glove
compartment. But Root insisted that he recalled nothing about his
flight from the moment he blacked out from "a shortness of breath"
until it ended in the water.

    Had Root tried to commit suicide and staged an elaborate show
to make his death look like an accident? Brett Geer, a
brother-in-law who talked with Root in the hospital Friday,
speculated that the lawyer's gun may have gone off during the
crash. Root, a father of three, is an avid gun collector. Last
April, in a check of the Virginia hangar where he kept his plane,
the police found 35 weapons; one was unregistered.

    One possible motive for suicide came to light when North
Carolina's secretary of state disclosed that his office was
investigating Root's role in an alleged security fraud. The FCC had
rebuked him for mishandling procedures in his law practice, which
specializes in helping investors get radio-station licenses. Root,
who is said to be in financial difficulty, is under investigation
by the U.S. Customs Service as a possible drug smuggler.

    Whether these problems had anything to do with the bizarre
journey remained a mystery at week's end. But if Root's flight does
turn out to have been a suicide mission, no one will be more
shocked than the rescuers who saw him madly swimming for dear life.