Last Saturday a 15-year old high school freshman named Charles Bishop piloted a light plane that wasn’t his into a corner office on the 26th floor of the Bank of America building in downtown Tampa Florida.
The young student pilot came out much the loser in the apparent suicide attack. When you look up at the building from the street you can see that—except for a medium-sized hole from broken windows—the crash of the small plane caused little damage. One lesson has already been learned as a result of the Tampa attack. In a head-on collision between a skyscraper and a single-engine Cessna, absent tons of jet fuel, the skyscraper comes out on top.
Absent tons of jet fuel.
The day after the attack was Sunday, and the plane was still sticking out of the 26th floor like a post-modernist sculpture. It attracted curious crowds of gawkers looking skyward, as if they could read a portent for the future in the plane's tail sticking out of the building.
Though the Bucs were closing out their season in town, there was still a big turnout at the news conference called by Tampa Chief of Police Bernie Holder.
Checking names against the 'enemies' list
Holder had the unenviable job of attempting to explain What Had Happened. Most thought the effort showed. Holder announced they had found a handwritten suicide note on the body. It expressed support for Osama bin Laden and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Holder stated the family hadn't known of the boy's sympathy for Arab terrorists.
Also in the note the dead youth had left instructions about his funeral arrangements, telling his mother, Julia Bishop, and his grandmother, Karen Johnson, not to let any of his enemies attend.
Though FBI agents and sheriff's officials spent several hours that afternoon with the boy's mother at her Palm Harbor apartment, detectives later said they were still trying to obtain information, even about simple matters like the identity of the boy's father.
A Pinellas County Sheriff's Office spokesman said the boy's mother and grandmother were distraught and "very much in denial."
"Apparently he (Charles) didn't have anyone in his family who would talk about him or his personality, so we don't know much about him," said the Sheriff's spokesman.
Julia Bishop, who changed her name and her son's from Bishara, has declined interviews since Saturday. She told Pinellas County officials she changed her name because Bishara is an Arabic name and the United States was at war with Iraq at the time.
Rumor has it she will be telling her story to People magazine first, no doubt because AOL-Time-Warner does such a good job of self-censorship with sensitive material.
But even though the mother and grandmother were mysteriously secluded behind impenetrable security, the real buzz was about Bishops' father, Charles J Bishara, half-Sicilian and half-Lebanese, who hailed from Winchester, Massachusetts.
He was an even bigger mystery. Police, we are told, have not been able to contact Bishara.
He was flat out missing. Authorities couldn't find him. He appears to have vanished without a trace. Later, after authorities have had time to float the "acne-induced suicide" trial balloon, it seeps out. Bishara is on the lam on heroin charges.
Wait a minute. Heroin. Hasn't heroin already surfaced in "our story thus far?"
Sure it has. Way back on October 19 in a story called "Was CIA Running Terrorist Flight School?" the MadCowMorningNews scooped Matt and Katie with a report that organized crime families were being viewed as particularly important for terrorist groups.
An example we cited then was the case of a Jersey City man accused of attempting to smuggle Stinger missiles out of the country to Osama bin Laden.
The deal he got caught doing was typical. It was oil and heroin up front for guns and training.
Some are now saying that this was exactly the kind of deal going down on the Florida Gulf Coast during the intrigue preceding the September 11th attack. Heroin had become a recurring plot element.
But this doesn't matter, because every news report right now seems to be at some pains to tell us all that "The father hasn't been involved in his (Charles) life since the child was one."
They are all very clear on that.
A dopey smile and a plan
Two conflicting accounts began to emerge of young dead Charles. We call the first the "Troubled Youth Scenario."
Bishops' parents divorced when Charles was a baby. He never knew his Dad. He lived with his mother. They moved frequently. No one thought to ask why.
Young Bishop kept to himself. He never mixed with the boys who rode bikes and scooters in his apartment complex. There was no apparent sweetheart in his life. ""He bordered on being shy," said Robyn Larson, a former next door neighbor.
He changed schools a lot. Nine schools in eight years. He didn't fit in at his new high school. They thought he was a geek.
"This was a new school for him, so he had not made friends with a lot of people," explained their attorney.
"It didn't seem like he wanted to fit into the norm, all the high school B.S.," said classmate Adam Goch, who also stated Bishop never spoke up in journalism class, nor befriended other students.
Also, Bishop's perpetual smile seemed "pretty weird," said Goch, a junior.
The Family Bishara
The divorced couple's name had been Bishara. His ex-wife changed her and her son's names legally to Bishop six years after their divorce. Young Charles Bishop was clearly aware of his dual heritage, and would refer cryptically to being of Arab extraction.
In a sad footnote, newspapers reported that Charles J. Bishara's parents first learned they had a grandson when they read of his spectacular death..
“It's just a tragedy to find your grandson in this way,'' Robert Bishara said. “We lost someone we didn't even know.''
Neighbors who had lived near the Bishops in Winchester said they were shocked that the young boy, who they remembered walking alone on their street, had crashed an airplane into a skyscraper. The boy kept to himself, they said.
Investigators for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement said the boy spent much time alone in his room. But they also stated Bishop had no history of mental problems and did not appear to be using illegal drugs.
It was left to hapless Tampa Police Chief Holder to sum up… Young Bishop's act of terrorism, said Chief Holder, really wasn't an act of terrorism. It was a desperate cry for help. The Tampa Chief reassured all Americans that the kid had been Acting Alone.
"He can best be described as a young man who has very few friends and who was very much a loner," Holder said. So the kid wasn't a terrorist. He was misguided.
"He saw something and decided to try it."
"We're trying to avoid the issue of terrorism because he was a 15-year-old kid who was pretty screwed up," James Sewell, director of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, said. "This is a … troubled kid who saw something and decided to try it."
Still, there was a definite buzz around the identity of Charles Bishop.
We haven't had a 15-year old kamikaze pilot deliberately fly a plane into a skyscraper before, which leads to the Big Question:
"What was up with Charley?"
The official explanation for what happened in Tampa Florida last Saturday afternoon, as we currently understand it, is that Charles Bishop died in the grips of a previously unpublicized but potentially fatal illness known as "Acne-Induced Suicide."
Or, more precisely, Acne Medication-Induced Suicide.
Suicide by zit.
Rather than a political statement of any kind, his suicide had merely been an unpleasant side effect of his medication.
Charles Bishop, officials now believe, has been the hapless victim of a brand of acne medicine that compelled him, somehow, to a suicidal high-speed collision in midair with a pretty sturdy stationary target.
Another side effect, apparently, involves heaping praise in suicide notes on Saudi terrorists who have a sideline in narcotics smuggling.
NEXT: Who was the kamikaze kid?
More About Charles Bishop and Buildings.
