The Red-Eye Strangler

Remember that time a psychopath suddenly, and without warning tried to strangle my dad on a red eye flight to Florida, and the flight attendent threatened to make an emergency landing, and homeland security met us at the gate when we landed? Well, if you were on that flight you would, because you just don't forget that kind of shit.

This is a long post—mainly because it is so bizarre that it requires a lot of explanation. I'm not sure how to condense it, so, I'll just lay it all out for you. But know this... every part of this story is the honest to God truth. This is not fiction, or an exageration of the truth. This actually happened.

In January 2009 my wife and son, my brothers, and my parents boarded a red eye flight from San Francisco to Florida on route to a cruise in the Caribbean. We were all seated in the same couple of rows of seats taking up both sides of the aisle. I was sitting in the aisle seat on the left side of the plane. To my left was my pregnant wife and my 2 year old son. Across the aisle to my right were my two brothers. My mom and dad were in the row behind me with my dad in the aisle seat. Got that? Good. Because you'll need to in order to fully understand how this went down.

While boarding the plane I had noticed that the man sitting in the seat directly in front of mine was not excited about having my toddler son sitting so close to him. How did I know this? Well, the man was snarling and making really mean faces at my kid while we were boarding and taxying, which should have been a red flag right off the bat, but at the time I was thinking that maybe the guy just had a really strange sense of humor and that we would all be asleep within a half hour of so anyway so whatever.

About an hour later, I woke up to my brother, Shea, punching me on the arm. "Dude, wake up and watch that guy in the aisle near the front of the plane. He's fucking crazy". I looked around and everybody was sleeping. The lights were low, but I could see a guy walking down the aisle toward us. As he got closer, I could see that he was probably a little over 6' and in his late 40s. It was the man who had been sitting directly in front of me, giving my kid the stink-eye. He was touching people as he walked down the aisle—mostly just shoulders and heads, but occasionally, he would stop and linger next to somebody just sort of staring at them. It was probably 1:30am and nobody really noticed because they were either asleep or wearing those stupid looking masks that cover your eyes.

I figured that he was making his was way back to his seat, but he passed his seat and kept walking. I didn't want to draw attention to me or my family by staring, but I didn't really want to lose sight of him either, so I was tracking him in my peripheral vision. I noticed that he stopped next to my dad, who, as you will recall, was sitting directly behind me. So, I turned around to see what he was doing.

He was standing sort of next to, but a little bit behind at my dad, who was asleep. He had both of his hands outstretched above my dad's bald head and he was wiggling his fingers as if he was giving my dad a pretend head massage, or maybe about to perform a magic trick. Then, with the kind of speed and force you'd expect from an alligator wrestler, from behind, the man placed one hand over my dad's mouth, and the other over his nose, while forcefully pulling my dad's head into the seat.

I wish I could say that we immediately jumped up and pulled him off, but it happened so fast, and it was unclear if the guy was falling over, or having a seaizure or what. So, I sat there in shock for a second waiting for the guy to regain his balance and let go of my dad's head. But after a couple of seconds, it became clear that wasn't going to happen. My dad, woke up about the same time that my brother and I jumped up and grabbed the man.

Three things you need to know about my dad...
1)The guy has a grip like a fucking vice. Big, overdeveloped hands and forearms from cutting and splicing cable with the phone company for 40 plus years.
2) He doesn't like unwanted attention and he really doesn't like to fly.
3) After raising three boys, having somebody jump on his back and start strangling him while he's sleeping is apparently less unsettling than you might imagine.

Naturally, thinking that this is one of his sons playing a bad joke on him, my dad rather calmly reached up, grabbed the man's forearm, and slowly started to put the crush on it. Within seconds the man let go and started hollering about his arm. He muttered something like "Hey man. You can't be grabbing my arm like that!" and walked back to his seat. Leaving us all standing there looking at each other like "What the fuck was THAT?"

We looked around expecting to see other passengers looking on in horror. But no. Everybody was sleeping, and nobody had heard anything because of the roar of the engines. As far as I could tell, nobody but my family and this crazy man, whom I'll call the strangler from here on out, had seen what happened.

A moment later the flight attendant came by and with a hint of annoyance, asked me to sit down because I was blocking the aisle. Apparently, she hadn't see anything either. So, I told her, "That man just tried to strangle my dad". But the thing was that the guy I was pointing at was now sitting calmly in his seat trying to sleep and my dad was doing his best to downplay the whole scuffle and get back to sleep as well. My mom was sitting next to my dad and you would think she would have woken up during all of this, but she was out cold—never even woke up.

So, the flight attendant kind of looked at me like I was the crazy one, said something like "Okay, go ahead and sit down.", and then walked away. And I started to wonder if I WAS the crazy one... until that strangler, sitting uncomfortably close to me turned around and started flipping off my dad and mouthing things like "Fuck You!" and "I'll fuck you up!" It was clear that he was super pissed and shit was going to go down. My brother's and I were sitting in the row between the strangler and our dad. Each time he would turn around to mouth off, you could hear a us taking our seat belts off—Click, Click, Click.

But we were on an airplane, and it's not like you can just beat the shit out of somebody mid-air and then merrily continue onto your destination. So, we kept our cool. I think we were all hoping that he would mouth off a bit, cool down, and go to sleep.

Somehow, the strangler seemed oblivious to the fact that my brothers and I were traveling with our dad and that we were ready to kick his ass. At one point he was complaining about how my dad had squeezed his arm really hard and turned around to ask if my brother and I had seen my dad grab him. Apparently, he hadn't realized that we were the other two people who stood up and grappled with him. Or he forgot. Or he was on drugs or SOMETHING. We said that we hadn't seen anything, that we were trying to sleep and that he should sleep too.

Occasionally he would get up and walk the aisles, gently touching other people while they were sleeping. He thought that a lady passing by in a dark blue sweater was the flight attendant and he grabbed and yanked her while she was walking by because he wanted to talk with her about the incident with my dad. At one point he had reached under his chair and grabbed one of my shoes, which I had taken off while I was sleeping earlier. He put it in his carry-on and placed it in his overhead bin. But I wasn't about to ruin our pending vacation over a shoe. So, I opted not to say anything. And just as I was envisioning a vacation with only one shoe and what kind of challenges that might present, he stood up, took his bag out, opened it and looked at the shoe as if he was totally confused by it. Then he placed it back under his seat without saying anything to me about it.

As the night wore on, he appeared to get angrier and angrier, and a few hours into the flight he sort of jumped out of his seat, spun around and angrily shook his fist at my dad. My dad was either asleep or doing his best to ignore the guy. In any case, he was getting no reaction. So, he sat down again.

I decided it was time to have another talk with the flight attendant. So, I hit the call button and she came to my seat. I was sitting just a couple feet from the guy and I didn't want to set him off. So, as quietly as possible, I told her that they guy was crazy, he was threatening us, and that there was probably going to be a brawl soon if she didn't step in. I'm guessing that she had been more attuned to the situation at this point because she took me serious this time.

She asked the strangler what was going on. He said that the a couple seats back had grabbed and crushed his arm. He said, "This is my first time flying, but I'm pretty sure you're not allowed to do THAT!". She must have been able to see the crazy in his eyes because she then told him very calmly that the authorities would be meeting him at the gate when we landed and that we could either make an emergency landing right now, or he could sit quietly and meet with the police when we landed in Florida.

The strangler suddenly changed his tune. He was incredulous. He said, "Did any of you see what happened? Did I do something to that guy back there? I don't remember anything... I must have been... uh... sleepwalking. Yeah, yeah. I was sleepwalking!". And for the final hour of the flight he spent most of his time trying to convince everybody around us, as well as my dad, that he had been sleepwalking, and apologized for anything that might have happened.

We landed in Florida, and just as the flight attendant had told us, plain clothes officers detained the strangler and my dad. We had been up all night, we were all a little tense, and we were in a hurry to make our connecting flight. My dad wanted nothing more but to get to our destination so he downplayed the whole thing saying something like, "Yeah, I don't know. That guy grabbed me while I was sleeping. He must have been confused or something. I don't think we should make a big deal about it".

It felt a little odd to just walk away and not peruse the whole thing further, but it was my dad who had been strangled, and if he was cool with it, then so be it. I guess you could argue that we should have taken this up further with the authorities as a matter of principle. But who needs principles when you're rushing to catch  connecting flight to the Caribbean, right?

We later saw the strangler walking around the terminal. I think we were all hoping to God that he wasn't going to end up on our next flight or on our cruise ship. Luckily, we never saw him again.