Lite Plane Crashes into Austin TX IRS Building

[The Bread Guy]

This, from the Austin Statesman:

A plane crashed into a Northwest Austin building that houses federal offices about 10 this morning, injuring several people and sparking a fire that sent plumes of smoke into the air that could be seen for miles.

A Federal Aviation Administration spokesman said the crash, at the Echelon 1 building in the 9400 block of Research Boulevard, was “apparently a criminal act.”
web0219crash.jpg

Austin Fire Department Division Chief Dawn Clopton said that the FBI would be taking over the investigation.

The plane, a single-engine Piper Cherokee, PA28, took off from a Georgetown airport at 9:40 a.m., Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Laura Brown said just after noon.

A federal official confirmed for the Statesman that its tail number is registered to a plane owned by Joseph Andrew Stack, a private plane pilot whose nearby home was on fire at roughly the same time.

The North Austin home was destroyed, but officials have not linked the two incidents.

A note posted on a Web site registered to Stack suggested that Stack was disgruntled with the U.S. tax system.

It is unclear who was piloting the plane when it crashed into the building.

An IRS revenue collection agent who worked on the building’s second floor is missing, said Mark Menn, a 59-year-old field revenue agent who worked in the building. Menn declined to give the man’s name.

Matilda Sanchez, spokeswoman for the Seton Family of Hospitals, said an injured man was admitted to University Medical Center Brackenridge in good condition with minor injuries and smoke inhalation. A second person, whose gender she did not know, was stabilized and airlifted to the burn unit at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio in serious condition with burn injuries....

And here's the online statement mentioned in the story above.

 

[PMedMoe]

Angry pilot slams into tax office

AUSTIN, Texas - A software engineer furious with the IRS launched a suicide attack on the U.S. tax agency Thursday by crashing his small plane into an office building containing nearly 200 Internal Revenue Service employees, setting off a raging fire that sent workers running for their lives.

Emergency crews recovered two bodies from the wreckage. The pilot was presumed dead and one worker in the building had been missing. Austin Fire Department Battalion Chief Palmer Buck declined to discuss the identities of those found, but said Thursday night that authorities had "accounted for everybody."

The FBI tentatively identified the pilot as A. Joseph Stack III, 53. Law enforcement officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because the investigation was still going on, said that before taking off, Stack apparently set fire to his house and posted a long anti-government screed on the Web. It was dated Thursday and signed "Joe Stack (1956-2010)."

In it, the author cited run-ins he had with the IRS and ranted about the tax agency, government bailouts and corporate America's "thugs and plunderers."

"I have had all I can stand," he wrote, adding: "I choose not to keep looking over my shoulder at 'big brother' while he strips my carcass."

More at link

 

[GAP]

Hmmm.....refund late?......