American Kamikaze in Austin
A small plane crashed into a Northwest Austin building that houses federal offices about 10 this morning, injuring several people and sparking a fire that sent plumes of smoke into the air that could be seen for miles.
Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo said the crash, at the Echelon 1 building in the 9400 block of Research Boulevard, “appears to be an intentional act, appears to be by a sole individual, and it appears this individual was targeting federal offices inside that building.”
Friends say they had no inkling of the rage tormenting a man believed to have deliberately crashed a small plane Thursday into an Internal Revenue Service building.
Joe Stack, who federal officials say flew his Piper Cherokee PA-28 into an IRS office, was carefree, friendly and professional, the former friends said.
“He was a regular, easygoing Joe,” said Billy Eli, in whose band Stack played bass until a few years ago.
But an apparent suicide message left on a Web site registered to Stack shows a different side: a man extremely angry at the IRS and more than 20 other entities he believed had been hurting him for a long time.
“He hid that very well,” Eli said. “Obviously he was in some serious distress and had some real despair. I never saw that.”
Another former band mate, Ric Furley, expressed a similar sentiment.
Austin attack stuns community.
A former FBI profiler said Stack, 53, apparently had been nursing pain for quite a while.
“He was a wound collector,” said Joe Navarro, a 25-year FBI veteran. But those wounds, Navarro said, may not have been evident.
“Unfortunately, what goes on in the mind often remains there,” Navarro said.
Two bodies recovered late Thursday remained publicly unidentified Friday.
Two other people were seriously injured and taken to a hospital, while 11 others were treated for minor injuries, Austin police Chief Art Acevedo said Thursday.
The two injured victims, both males, were taken to University Medical Center Brackenridge, according to Matilda Sanchez, a spokeswoman for Seton Family of Hospitals, which runs the medical center.
