Air Marshal shoots and kills suspect

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Agreed. Though it is sad to know that even today, guns are not only a staple but the flagship of defense, though. Some sort of high penetration hand held dart gun/tranquilizer would have made for a happier ending.

Sure, a terrorist may be able to take something to cancel out the tranq before setting out on his mission and some tranqs might cause an allergic reaction that kills innocents. None of that makes guns the best solution.

"In this post-9/11 world it is OK to shoot people on suspicion."

Sick of it. Really sick of it.

He didn't have a bomb. I think that someone gaslighted him.

And he LEFT THE PLANE with that alleged bomb in his hand. Excuse me, but how is that such a dangerous situation? If he had been correct about it being a bomb, he would have been trying to save lives. If he was taking a bomb away from a plane, was he increasing or decreasing the danger to passengers?

It's post-9/11 all right. It is the era of, if you are an officer who is authorized to use a gun, you can be as dim-witted as you want to be. Gun down someone who is in full flight away from other people carrying what might be a bomb, there's an act of real genius. Better make him dead before he gets too far away from the plane, otherwise we don't know what might happen. Better yet, shoot him at point blank range with several men on him. There's how we act real brave and real professional.

Let me throw another idea in here. It's been four years now since 9/11 and this thing is snowballing. It's turning into a mass psychosis, a hysteria, a mental illness. Isn't our mental health more important to us than trying to prevent the next "gotcha"? We're doing it to ourselves and we're not even trying not to do it to ourselves. When we condone the murder of a man who "might be", we've lost the part of ourselves that the terrorists aimed to take away from us. We're not safe without it, we're a danger to ourselves and others.

Well, A) he might have had a bomb and B) he might have been running to detonate it in the airport itself (thus killing more ppl than if he detonated on the plane and ruining flights on other planes as well).

In retrospect, A) is false and thus B) is impossible. But hindsight is 20/20. Ideally they would have been able to take him down w/o having to shoot him. But they didn't. Did they do wrong?

Well if he had an actual bomb, then no they didn't do wrong. But he had no bomb. So did they make a mistake?

My question is: why use a gun in the first place? A dart might have done just as well, or maybe laughing gas. I dunno but the point is they didn't have to kill him to knock him out at a distance.

He left the airplane. He actually removed himself and his "bomb" from a much more dangerous target, or are you forgetting that airplanes carry tens of thousands of gallons of flammable fuels and that other airplanes are close by?

The federal marshalls shot the man to death as they were holding him down.

They couldn't take the chance that he was just what he appeared to be, someone who was freaking out and running away from the plane? So they had to hold him down and put bullets in his brain because he couldn't stop himself from freaking out? God I'm glad I'm not from this planet.

Am I the only one who thinks it's kind of dangerous to fire a gun on an air plane? I see nothing wrong with having one if you need to, but a dart gun would seem a lot less dangerous for everyone.
*Reads article*
Oh, not on the plane. Then why does it matter that he has a bomb? If they had him restrained (if tackled means restrained), any furtehr reaction is just over reacting. Post 9-11 or not, this could've been avoided.

The real Fair and balanced News not that Fox News Channel B.S.

MIAMI, Florida (CNN) -- A 44-year-old U.S. citizen who claimed to have a bomb was shot and killed when air marshals opened fire on a boarding bridge at the Miami airport, several sources told CNN. No bomb was found.

American Airlines Flight 924 was in Miami on a stopover during a flight from Medellin, Colombia, to Orlando, Florida, when the man, identified as Rigoberto Alpizar, said there was a bomb in his carry-on backpack, a Department of Homeland Security official said.

Alpizar was confronted by a team of federal air marshals, who followed him down the boarding bridge and ordered him to get on the ground, the official said.

When Alpizar appeared to reach into his backpack, he was shot and wounded, the official said, adding that the marshals' actions were consistent with their training. Officials said later that the man died of his injuries.

Upon investigation, there was no evidence that Alpizar had a bomb, an official said.

Alpizar was traveling with a woman and had arrived in Miami on a plane from Quito, Ecuador, federal officials said. He and the woman began arguing before getting off the plane in Miami, two officials said.

A passenger, Mary Gardner, told WTVJ in Miami that the man ran frantically down the aisle from the rear of the plane, arms flailing, and that the woman accompanying him said that her husband was bipolar and had not taken his medication, according to The Associated Press.

After he got off the plane in Miami and went through customs, he got on the Orlando-bound plane and said he had a bomb, Air Marshal Service spokesman Dave Adams said.

Air marshals asked him to get off the plane, which he did, but when they asked him to put his bag down, he refused, Adams said. Alpizar then approached the marshals in an aggressive manner, at which point two or three shots were fired, he said.

Karlina Griffith, translating for her grandmother, witness Miriam Delgado, told WFOR television that Delgado heard three gunshots before people started running and "going crazy."

Officials could not confirm if Alpizar suffered from mental illness. His mother-in-law told WKMG television in Orlando that he suffered from bipolar disorder, but his brother-in-law, Steven Buechner, told CNN he was unaware of any mental problems.

Alpizar moved to the United States from Costa Rica in 1986 and worked for Home Depot, Buechner said. He and his wife had been in South America since the day after Thanksgiving to help her uncle, a volunteer dentist, Buechner said.

Alpizar and his wife lived in Maitland, Florida, just a few miles north of Orlando, and they had no children, Buechner said.

The killing marks the first time a federal air marshal has fired a weapon at an individual since the program was bolstered after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Footage from the scene showed armed SWAT team members carrying rifles outside the aircraft, along with more than a dozen police vehicles. Paramedics were standing on the stairway to the aircraft.

Investigators took the backpack and two other pieces of Alpizar's luggage onto the tarmac, and an explosives team blew the bag open by firing a bottle full of water at it. The water is used to effectively defuse any explosive device by separating its components.

The Boeing 757, which can hold about 180 passengers, was due to take off for Orlando at 2:18 p.m. ET. It had arrived in Miami at 12:16 p.m. ET, according to the airline's Web site. No other flights at Miami International were disrupted Wednesday, an airport official said.

The only difference between the Fox story and the CNN story is that the CNN story came later when there was more time to sort things out. There are no changes in the most importnt details. Whatever story you go by, the guy clearly singled himself out for natural selseciton.