Air Marshals 'Had To Stop Threat'

The air marshals who shot and killed an agitated passenger handled the situation exactly right, say officials and security experts.

Rigoberto Alpizar ran down the aisle of an American Airlines Boeing 757 that had landed in Miami, claiming to have a bomb in his backpack. Once out on the jetway connecting the plane to the terminal, he ignored the marshals' orders and reached into his backpack.

"There were like four or five shots and then everybody hit the deck," Flight 924 passenger Mary Gardner said Thursday on CBS News' The Early Show. "That's when everybody started praying I think. It was scary."

The shooting marked a first for federal air marshals, who have been flying in much greater numbers since Sept. 11, reports CBS News correspondent Bob Orr. The marshals, who often fly in teams, regularly train with weapons in aircraft mockups to learn how to shoot safely in very confined and congested spaces.

There was no alternative other than to shoot Alpizar, Federal Air Marshal Service spokesman Dave Adams said.

"Mr. Alpizar was told to drop his bag. He kept approaching the federal air marshals ... He reached to the bag, started approaching the federal air marshals again," Adams told Early Show co-anchor René Syler. "They had to stop the threat. The only thing was to be able to immediately stop it for their safety and the safety of passengers in the terminal."

"They did exactly what they were trained to do," he added.

"They've got to make the decision based on their conversations with this individual, what they tell him to do, and the fact that he's not responding, and he says he has a bomb," said CBS News security consultant Robert Strang.

"There are too many people around, not only the lives of the actual air marshals, but there are other people in the immediate area," Strang, a former FBI agent, told CBS Radio News. "They're trained to be able to respond to this kind of thing. They had no choice but to shoot him."

Alpizar, a 44-year-old U.S. citizen, had arrived earlier in the day from Quito, Ecuador, and Flight 924 was going to Orlando, near his home in Maitland.

Alipizar's sister-in-law, Jeanne Jentsch,

Relatives said Alpizar and his wife had been on a working vacation in Peru. A neighbor who said he had been asked to watch the couple's home described the vacation as a missionary trip.

"We're all still in shock. We're just speechless," a sister-in-law, Kelley Beuchner, said by telephone from her home in Milwaukee.

The shooting occurred shortly after 2 p.m. as Flight 924 was about to take off for Orlando with the man and 119 other passengers and crew, American spokesman Tim Wagner said.

"Shortly after the gentleman went through first class and out the door, his wife returned back toward coach, apologizing, that her husband was sick and she had to collect her bags," said passenger Michael Beshears, who describes the passenger's wife as "borderline hysterical."

"Shortly after the shots rang out she was moving back toward — I think she was attempting to get to the jetway," Beshears told co-anchor Hannah Storm. "And I have to commend the flight attendant for stopping her there in our row."

"[Mrs. Alpizar] said, 'my husband is bipolar he didn't take his medicine,'" Gardner added.

The two marshals who were involved in the incident have been pulled from active duty and are being questioned as part of the investigation. CBS News correspondent Susan Roberts reports security appeared normal at Miami International Airport Thursday morning.

The White House Thursday said the marshals followed all "protocols" in their encounter with the man, reports CBS News correspondent Peter Maer. Spokesman Scott McClellan said the FBI and Homeland Security are doing a follow up investigation to check for "lessons learned."

After the shooting, police boarded the plane.

"When the SWAT team came in, that was absolutely terrifying because the guns were all pointed at all of us. It was very scary and went on quite a while," said Gardner.

Investigators spread passengers' bags on the tarmac and let dogs sniff them for explosives, and bomb squad members blew up at least two bags.

No bomb was found, said James E. Bauer, agent in charge of the Federal Air Marshals field office in Miami. He said there was no reason to believe there was any connection to terrorists.

The concourse where the shooting took place was shut down for a half-hour, but the rest of the airport continued operating, officials said.

Alpizar's brother-in-law, Steven Beuchner, said he was a native of Costa Rica, and met Beuchner's sister, Anne, when she was an exchange student there. Relatives said the couple had been married about two decades.

Neighbors described Alpizar as a pleasant man who worked in the paint department of a home-supply store and spent his spare time tending to the lawn of his ranch-style house. Many found it incomprehensible that he could have made a bomb threat.

"He was a nice guy, always smiling, always talkative," Louis Gunther said. "Everybody is talking about a guy I know nothing about."

Alex McLeod, 16, who lives three houses from the Alpizars, said: "This whole neighborhood is shocked. ... Totally uncharacteristic of the guy."

There were only 33 air marshals at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks. The Bush administration hired thousands more afterward, but the exact number is classified.

"Why we don't have them on every air flight is beyond me," Strang said. "If we can put money all across this country in low-risk areas, and not have an air marshal on an airplane, it makes absolutely no sense."

Marshals fly undercover, and which planes they're on is a closely guarded secret.

"As we move into the holiday season, as people are starting to travel, I think people can feel safe that airplanes won't be used as missiles, so things are 100 percent better than they were four years ago," Strang said.