Firefighters examine the devastation on the second floor while the remains of the aircraft can be seen below
Investigators examine the crash site. The remains of the airplane, above left, clings to the building
Joseph Stack set fire to his house before crashing his plane into the tax office
Impact: Smoke billows from the seven-storey office building in Texas today after a plane slammed into it
Aftermath: Joseph Stack flew his plane 'at full throttle' into the tax revenue service building
Evacuation: FBI agents stare in awe at what appears to be the mangled tail of the plane. Law enforcement officials are investigating claims the pilot flew deliberately into the building following a domestic dispute
Devastation: The damage to the seven-storey building can clearly be seen as the offices continue to burn
Thick smoke can be seen coming from the second and third storeys of the building today.Shock: Workers from nearby offices stand in silence as they take in the devastation caused by the crash
A Piper Cherokee plane, similar to the one flown by Stack into the third floor of the building in Texas
A struggling IT engineer with a grudge against the U.S. tax agency launched a suicide attack yesterday by crashing his plane into one of its buildings.
Two bodies have been recovered from the Internal Revenue Service building in Austin, Texas.
One is believe to be that of pilot Joseph Stack III, 53, and the other is a worker in the building.
Witness Stuart Newberg said the plane looked 'very controlled' as it flew in 'low and fast like a remote control aircraft'.
Police believe that before taking off, Stack set fire to his house and posted a long anti-government letter on the internet. It was dated Thursday and signed 'Joe Stack (1956-2010)'.
In it, he referred to 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.'
The tax protest movement has a long history in the U.S. and was a strong component of anti-government sentiments that surged during the 1990s.
Anti-tax protesters typically believe that they do not have to pay income taxes.
Some have been convicted in recent years for targeting IRS officials for harassment and even trying to kill them.
The pilot took off in a four-seat, single engine Piper PA-28 from an airport in Georgetown, about 30 miles from Austin, without filing a flight plan.
He flew low over the Austin skyline before smashing into the side of the hulking, seven-story, black-glass building just before 10am local time.
Flames shot from the building, windows exploded, a huge pillar of black smoke rose over the city, and the building's 190 terrified workers rushed to get out.
The Pentagon scrambled two F-16 fighter jets from Houston to patrol the skies over the burning building before it became clear that it was the act of a lone pilot, and President Barack Obama was briefed.
'It felt like a bomb blew off,' said Peggy Walker, an IRS revenue officer who was sitting at her desk. 'The ceiling caved in and windows blew in. We got up and ran.'
At least 13 people were injured, with two reported in critical condition. About 190 IRS employees work in the building.
Gerry Cullen was eating breakfast at a restaurant across the street when the plane struck the building and 'vanished in a fireball'.
Matt Farney, who was in the parking lot of a nearby Home Depot, said he saw a low-flying plane near some apartments just before it crashed.
'I figured he was going to buzz the apartments or he was showing off,' Farney said. 'It was insane. It didn't look like he was out of control or anything.'
Sitting at her desk in another building a half-mile from the crash, Michelle Santibanez felt the vibrations and ran to the windows, where she and her co-workers witnessed a scene that reminded them of Sept. 11.
'It was the same kind of scenario, with window panels falling out and desks falling out and paperwork flying,' said Santibanez, an accountant.
The building, in a central part of Austin, was still smouldering six hours later, with the worst of the damage on the second and third floors.
The entire outside of the second floor was gone on the side of the building where the plane hit. Support beams were bent inward. Venetian blinds dangled from blown-out windows, and large sections of the exterior were blackened with soot.
Andrew Jacobson, an IRS revenue officer who was on the second floor when the plane hit with a 'big whoomp' and then a second explosion, said about six people couldn't use the stairwell because of smoke and debris.
He found a metal bar to break a window so the group could crawl out onto a concrete ledge, where they were rescued by firefighters. His bloody hands were bandaged.
Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo said 'heroic actions' by federal employees may explain why the death toll was so low.
The FBI is investigating. The National Transportation Safety Board sent an investigator as well.
In the long, rambling, self-described 'rant' that Stack posted on the internet, he began: 'If you're reading this, you're no doubt asking yourself, 'Why did this have to happen?"'
He recounted his financial difficulties, his problems finding work in Austin, and at least two clashes with the IRS, one of them after he filed no return because, he said, he had no income, the other after he failed to report his wife's income.
He railed against politicians, the Catholic Church, the 'unthinkable atrocities' committed by big business, and the government bailouts that followed. He said he slowly came to the conclusion that 'violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer'.
'I saw it written once that the definition of insanity is repeating the same process over and over and expecting the outcome to suddenly be different. I am finally ready to stop this insanity. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let's try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well,' he wrote.
According to California state records, Stack had a troubled business history, twice starting software companies in California that ultimately were suspended by the state's tax board, one in 2000, the other in 2004. Also, his first wife filed for bankruptcy in 1999, listing a debt to the IRS of nearly $126,000.
The blaze at Stack's home, a red-brick house in a middle-class neighbourhood six miles fom the crash site, caved in the roof and blew out the windows.
Elbert Hutchins, who lives one house away, said the house caught fire about 9:15am local time. He said a woman and her daughter drove up to the house before firefighters arrived.
'They both were very, very distraught,' said Hutchins, a pensioner who said he didn't know the family well. '"That's our house!' they cried. 'That's our house!"'
Yesterday was not the first time a tax protester went after an Austin IRS building. In 1995, Charles Ray Polk plotted to bomb the IRS Austin Service Center. He was released from prison in October of last year.
Rep. Michael McCaul, a Republican from Austin on the Homeland Security Committee, said the panel will take up the issue of how to better protect buildings from attacks with planes.
He arrived, as so many do, from California, graying and open-faced, working in the computing industry, quietly nursing strong feelings about the government and moonlighting with a rock band.
In this once sleepy college music town, where waves of expansion borne on semiconductor seas have made an unofficial city motto of the bumper sticker slogan “Keep Austin Weird,” no one could have seemed more normal than A. Joseph Stack III, the amateur pilot who crashed his small airplane into an Internal Revenue Service office building on Thursday.
“I never saw Joe angry about anything,” said Billy Eli, a honkytonk bandleader who played with Mr. Stack for about three years. “He was just a middle-of-the-road kind of dude.”
As the Federal Bureau of Investigation led a criminal inquiry into the crash on Friday, closing streets, sifting for evidence through burned rubble wet from overnight rains and working to identify two bodies, a portrait of Mr. Stack emerged as a companionable family man unrecognizable from the diatribe posted online in his name.
His wife, Sheryl Stack, issued a brief statement, saying only that “words cannot adequately express my sorrow or the sympathy I feel for everyone affected by this unimaginable tragedy.”
His final act, a fireballing kamikaze crash that killed an Internal Revenue Service worker believed to be Vernon Hunter, 67, and seriously injured two others, immediately eclipsed the quadruple slaying known as the Yogurt Shop Murders of 1991 to stand as the most spectacular crime here in a generation, since the former Marine Charles Whitman shot 44 people from a perch atop the University of Texas Tower in 1966.
In an autobiographical airing of grievances posted to a Web site he controlled, Mr. Stack railed against a local accountant, Bill Ross, who responded with his own statement on Friday, saying Mr. Stack had attracted auditors by lying about his income.
Mr. Stack also assailed big business, politicians and tax policies that limited the entrepreneurial prospects of computer software engineers. In particular, he said an arcane section of tax code directed at independent technology workers had caused him sufficient financial grief — his private plane and 2,500-square-foot home notwithstanding — to conclude that “violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer.”
Somewhere along the trajectory of a life that began in the anonymity of an orphanage in Pennsylvania, where he was charged with mucking out dairy barns, and ended in notoriety on the national blogosphere, where his public statement was mined for political point-scoring on both sides, a quiet disconnect known only to his most intimate associates developed in the 53-year-old man known here as Joe.
On arrival in this growing capital city, best known for its music scene, its technology booms and the tension between the two, Mr. Stack fit a certain local stereotype, the musician-technophile crossover. At home he hunkered in front of a computer with two screens, relatives said, and at gigs he mingled without much visible anxiety.
“He was an engineer by trade, so he had that aura about him,” said Pamela Parker, a lawyer who is married to Mr. Eli, the bandleader. “A bit engineerish, but easygoing, even-tempered.”
On the music scene, Mr. Stack registered as a workaday bassist, a valuable commodity in a town of frontmen and lead guitars. Despite years of expansion, the city remains chummy enough that a local reporter, writing in the Friday edition of The Austin American-Statesman, was able to recount playing a backyard gig with him.
Around 2005, Mr. Stack auditioned for a spot in Mr. Eli’s ensemble. He performed on one album and onstage for about three years. At rehearsal breaks he spoke lightheartedly of his childhood and his aspirations in the aerospace business. When taxes came up in conversation, his tone seemed no more strident than the usual April 15 blues.
“He was a competent bass player,” Mr. Eli recalled. “He did what we needed. He was easy to get along with. He didn’t have any ego.”
After a few years, Mr. Stack dropped out of the band. Mr. Eli was booking more extensive touring dates, and Mr. Stack was acquiring new local responsibilities.
On July 8, 2007, Mr. Stack married the former Sheryl Housh, a divorced piano instructor who had once spent four years with The Way International, widely regarded as a religious cult. Since settling in Austin in the late 1980s, Ms. Housh had made the acquaintance of several locally prominent musicians, though few seemed willing to speak about her on Friday.
Mr. Stack doted on his new wife and her 12-year-old daughter, friends and relatives said. Together they lived in a two-story red brick house in North Austin, making little impression on neighbors. Mr. Stack kept his fixed-wing single-engine Piper PA-28-236 Dakota at Georgetown Municipal Airport, about 24 miles north of the city.
“His name never came up,” said Jack Lillis, an airport attendant. “He’s one of many who rent hangar space here.”
An enthusiastic aviator, Mr. Stack flew his family to visit relatives in Oklahoma and to a summer vacation in Arizona, said Jack Cook, Mrs. Stack’s stepfather.
After his marriage, he largely withdrew from the music scene. At family gatherings he maintained appearances. He told few besides his wife of a simmering anger for which, he wrote, “there isn’t enough therapy in the world.”
In the end he set the family home on fire, took off in his plane and concluded that violence was indeed the answer to his troubled mind.
“I spent my entire life,” Mr. Stack wrote, “trying to believe it wasn’t so.”
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