“I absolutely never heard the word ‘bomb’ at all,” said John McAlhany, a construction worker on the same flight. “I heard an argument with his wife. He was saying, ‘I have to get off the plane.’ She said, ‘Calm down.’”

“The wife was telling him, ‘Calm down. Let other people get on the plane. It will be all right,’” Alan Tirpak, another passenger, told the press.

“I did not hear him say that he had a bomb,” Mary Gardner, a third passenger, told the media.

Alpizar then reportedly ran down the aisle of the plane with his wife behind him. “She was running behind him saying, ‘He’s sick. He’s sick. He’s ill. He’s got a disorder,’” said McAlhany. “She was trying to explain to the marshals that he was ill. He just wanted to get off the plane.”

The 44-year-old man worked in Home Depot’s paint department and suffered from bipolar (manic-depressive) disorder. He was a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Costa Rica.

The federal cops chased him off the plane and gunned him down on the jetway. They found no bomb anywhere in the vicinity.

“I can’t conceive that the marshals wouldn’t be able to overpower an unarmed single man, especially knowing he had already cleared every security check,” Alpizar’s brother, Carlos, told the Orlando Sentinel.

After Alpizar was killed, heavily armed cops took over the plane.

“They stuck guns in our faces…. They were waving the barrels, shouting, ‘Everyone get your hands on the seats! No one move!’” Jorge Borrelli, one of the passengers, told the press. Borrelli moved to stop Alpizar’s wife, who was trying to reach her dying husband, out of fear that the police would shoot her as well. “That was the scariest part. I thought, God, if someone freaks out and jumps up, they’re going to start shooting.”

“This was wrong,” said fellow passenger McAlhany. “This man should be with his family for Christmas. Now he’s dead.”

White House spokesman Scott McClellan defended the marshals’ actions. “The team of air marshals acted in a way that is consistent with the training that they have received,” he said. Since Sept. 11, 2001, the number of heavily armed federal agents on planes has increased. The website that describes the program says there were only 33 air marshals prior to 9/11. Since then, “almost overnight the Service received over 200,000 applications. A classified number of these applicants were screened, hired, trained, certified and deployed on flights around the world.”

In a December 9 editorial, the Investor’s Business Daily endorsed the actions of the federal cops. While calling the shooting a “tragedy,” the paper said the killing of Alpizar “lets all Americans know—and puts would be terrorists on notice—that we are able and willing to use lethal force to kill someone viewed as a potential threat. In other words: We’re serious.”
 
 
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Australian gov’t boosts cop powers for ‘counterterrorism’  
 
 
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