A man’s screams could be heard in the bathroom of an Alaska Airlines flight. Federal officials say the man got violent when a nurse tried to help him, which caused a bloody and chaotic scene.
The man, who is 38 years old and from Minnesota, was given five years of probation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Alaska on May 23 for assaulting a flight attendant and getting in the way of a flight crew’s usual duties.
Samuel Eilers, the federal defender who was hired to represent him, declined to speak when asked by McClatchy News on May 24.
Court papers say that when the man got off the plane from Minneapolis to Anchorage on June 24, he screamed and stepped outside. An airline worker smelled a “strange, burnt, metallic” smell.
He then shakily made his way to his seat but walked right past it, and court papers say he stopped responding. Prosecutors say that a flight worker got Narcan, an opioid reversal drug after a nurse on the plane checked on him and thought he was overdosing.
Police say the man woke up when the nurse tried to give him the medicine with the help of the flight crew and a male customer.
According to the sentencing memorandum, he started to “violently struggle” when the nurse put the Narcan in his nose and fought against people who were trying to help. Flight attendants had to restrain his arms, and a passenger had to restrain his legs.
Police say the man then grabbed or pushed the flight attendant who got the Narcan by the throat, breaking her necklace.
He had a bloody nose and mouth by the time two more passengers came to help, the sentencing memo says.
Prosecutors said that Burch’s blood was touched by several flight attendants and customers, and one passenger got some in his mouth.
The nurse gave him two Narcan shots, but the sentencing memo says he kept trying to get away.
Lawyers for the flight attendant he is accused of assaulting put flex-cuffs on his legs and wrists as a result.
The crew members on Alaska Airlines Flight 183 on June 24, 2023, kept the other passengers safe and calm during a stressful situation. “We are very grateful to them,” an Alaska Airlines spokeswoman told McClatchy News on May 24.
Two arrests for the passenger
The man was arrested when the plane got to Anchorage, and officials say he was held in federal custody for six days.
Officials from the U.S. Attorney’s office said in the release that he was caught and held in state custody for 72 days because he broke the terms of his state parole by leaving the state without permission.
Prosecutors say that after pleading guilty in December, he broke the rules of his supervised release in March, which led to another arrest.
Since then, he has been held and has spent 66 days in federal custody, according to authorities.
“Not proud”
In a sentencing memorandum for his client, Eilers wrote that the man had a past of “crippling drug addiction” that “gave way” after he was arrested in the case.
Eilers says that he was taking a plane to Alaska with his grandson for a fishing trip that they had planned “for over a year.”
The memo says that two hours after the trip, “he smoked a synthetic opiate” in the bathroom of the plane.
Along with his sentence, he finished a 45-day outpatient treatment program, which Eilers wrote about in the sentencing memo.
The man wrote to a federal judge on March 22:
“I’m fully aware of what I did that led to these charges.” Being high on drugs and the damage it caused to other people are not things I am proud of.
When there is an attack on a plane, the FBI is in charge of looking into it.
Federal law says that interfering with a flight crew or other illegal actions on an airplane puts all people in danger and is illegal. This was said by Rebecca Day, who is in charge of the FBI’s Anchorage field office.
