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Teen Suicide Pilot Leaves Investigators Puzzled
Saturday, January 12, 2002
(2:42 PM ET)
By Vickie Chachere
The Associated Press

Twelve minutes after he took off, Bishop's plane struck the 28th floor of the 42-story office tower, scattering office furniture and a black leather chair in a law office. Just an hour earlier, an attorney had been at his desk in the corner office.

TAMPA, Fla. -- AP
Charles Bishop ambled through life the way many other 15-year-olds do -- a square peg, a shy kid with a bad complexion and big dreams.

So when he crashed a stolen Cessna into a skyscraper and left a handwritten note showing sympathy for Osama bin Laden, Bishop again seemed to fit a familiar profile: copycat teen grasping for attention.

But as investigators probed deeper into the boy's life, they began to see a jumble of contradictions.

Why would he target a skyscraper after telling friends that he abhorred the World Trade Center attacks and wanted to go to Afghanistan and "get the SOBs"?

Why would an honor student who knew patriotic songs by heart and aspired to join the Air Force sympathize with bin Laden, the nation's No. 1 enemy?

Why would he tell his grandmother that if anything happened to him he didn't want his "enemies" coming to his funeral, a request similar to one made in the last will and testament of suicide pilot Mohamed Atta?

Bishop had warned a friend in an e-mail just hours before his Jan. 5 flight that he was "going to be on the news." But few imagined anything like this.

With the images of the crash still fresh, investigators are working on a "psychological autopsy."

But they acknowledge that they may never know what motivated Bishop, and that the answers may have vanished with him into the hole he left in the skyscraper's 28th floor.
(More: Nando Times News Source)
2002 © The Associated Press.

Dan