Images obtained by TMZ<\/a> showed the restrained man duct taped to his seat on American Airlines Flight 618 from Dallas-Fort Worth Thursday night. Another passenger on the plane said the man was “thrashing around” as flight attendants and other passengers restrained him in the last row of first class. In a video recorded on the flight, one flight attendant can be seen holding duct tape.<\/p>\n“I think he hurt himself and was bleeding on the seat and apparently was assaulting the man sitting next to him, who was another man dressed in a suit,” said Michelle Ng-Reyes. “The three men that were holding him down were saying things like ‘Stop moving, please stop yelling, just sit down.'”<\/p>\n
Ng-Reyes told NBC New York an air marshal sitting close to her also helped subdue the unruly passenger.<\/p>\n
“When they were restraining him, he was slurring his words, so they thought maybe he had too much to drink,” Ng-Reyes said. “But also the air marshal was like, it\u2019s not crazy to say he had some kind of mental episode or a break.”<\/p>\n
Others passengers claimed the man was yelling racially derogatory slurs at the man sitting next to him, according to Ng-Reyes.<\/p>\n
“The man he was attacking looked Middle Eastern and was wearing a nice business suit,” said Ng-Reyes. “I had heard he started saying racist things to this man before he attacked him.”<\/p>\n
The man, who has not been identified, also seemed to target three flight attendants who were Black, according to Ng-Reyes, noting that his actions sparked concerns for the flight’s safety.<\/p>\n
“They had to physically restrain him cause they were worried he might try to go into the cockpit or something which is obviously pretty scary,” she said.<\/p>\n
The flight was detoured to Baltimore. What should have been a 3.5-hour journey turned into an eight-hour ordeal by the time finally made it to Newark, Ng-Reyes said. The enraged passenger had to be dragged off the plane because he initially refused to get off, she added.<\/p>\n
In a statement, American Airlines said that “law enforcement met\u2004the aircraft and assisted\u2004with\u2004deplaning the\u2004customer before the flight continued to its\u2004 destination. The safety and security of our customers\u2004and team members\u2004is our top priority and\u2004we\u2004do not tolerate violence.”<\/p>\n
It was not immediately clear what charges the disruptive passenger would face from Baltimore authorities. The FBI said it was investigating to determine whether federal charges would be filed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An erratic passenger aboard a flight bound for Newark Airport had to be duct-taped to his seat after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":338966,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[3294,1066,9,24,1086,63,134,136,135],"class_list":["post-338965","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-staten-island","tag-crime-and-courts","tag-new-jersey","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-newark-airport","tag-nyc","tag-staten-island","tag-staten-island-headlines","tag-staten-island-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338965","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=338965"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338965\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/338966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=338965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=338965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=338965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}