(NEW YORK) — Joseph Emerson, a former Alaska Airlines pilot, calls it the biggest mistake of his life.
Emerson was inside an Alaska Airlines cockpit last October when he raised his arms and pulled two large red levers that could have shut down both engines, at 30,000 feet. He calls the incident the worst 30 seconds of his life.
Ten months later, he is now grateful for those moments: They’ve saved his marriage, allowed him more time with his kids, and thrust him into a life of therapy, recovery, and the launch of a new non-profit designed to help other pilots struggling with mental illness.
Now Emerson and his wife, Sarah, are describing that incident, and the anxious, challenging months that followed, in an interview with ABC News.
“I made a big mistake.”
Emerson sent his wife Sarah a text message on Oct. 22, 2023, moments after he was removed from that cockpit and just before he asked a flight attendant to handcuff him.
“I made a big mistake,” the message read.
Sarah Emerson replied: “What’s up? Are you ok?”
“I’m not,” Joe Emerson replied.
That was the last time Sarah Emerson heard from her husband for days. She immediately tracked his flight and learned it had diverted and made an emergency landing in Portland.
Sarah knew little of what happened for 24 hours. It wasn’t until a jail receptionist told her that she learned her husband had been charged with 83 counts of attempted murder – one count for every soul on the aircraft.
“I walk up to the window and say I’m looking for my husband and he kind of just looked on the computer and typed some things in and then nonchalantly tells me the charges, and I lost it,” Sarah Emerson told ABC News. “I screamed and I keeled over, and I almost fell. They grabbed me and pulled me over because I know what that means. I was in a complete shock.”
What happened
Joe Emerson had been struggling over the death of his best friend, Scott, a pilot who died while on a run six years earlier. Emerson had been away for the weekend with friends, celebrating and remembering Scott.
On Friday night, the group took psychedelic mushrooms – a drug that can make you hallucinate and typically has effects that last a few hours. Emerson said that for him, the physical side effects lasted days, and the consequences a lifetime.
Joe and Sarah Emerson speak with ABC News.
Something wasn’t right
As a friend drove him to the airport, Emerson said all he could think about was being home with his family, but a deepening fear that he would never make it began to overtake him. It intensified as he took his jump seat inside the confined cockpit of the Alaska Airlines jet.
“There was a feeling of being trapped, like, ‘Am I trapped in this airplane and now I’ll never go home?'” Emerson told ABC News, in an interview near his home in California.
Emerson said the feeling increased – and with it, a belief that ” this isn’t real, I’m not actually going home … until I became completely convinced that none of this was real,” Emerson said.
As the Alaska Airlines plane headed toward San Francisco, Emerson said his conditioned worsened. He reached out to a friend who texted Emerson to do breathing exercises. Instead of helping, Emerson said, the moment when his phone read the text in his ear ultimately pushed him over the edge.
“That’s kind of where I flung off my headset, and I was fully convinced this isn’t real and p>
11-year-old perpetrator
Chell said police have made several arrests in the crime spree, including one alleged perpetrator just 11 years old.
“The 11-year-old is on video using credit cards stolen from robberies where? In Central Park,” Chell said. “So, this is what we’re combatting.”
Chell said the 11-year-old assailant and several other alleged teenage perpetrators arrested recently are among the migrants who have been pouring into the city.
But not all of the crimes have been the work of roving groups of criminals.
On June 24, a 21-year-old woman sunbathing at 1:30 p.m. in the Great Hill section of the park was attacked by a man who exposed himself and attempted to sexually assault her, police said. The victim managed to fight off the attacker who ran from the scene. A 43-year-old man, whom police identified as Jermaine Longmire, was arrested in the crime and charged with attempted rape and sexual abuse, according to police.
Longmire has pleaded not guilty to the charges and, according to online records, remains locked up at Rikers Island jail.
Chell said the NYPD has a “mandate” to keep park visitors safe.
“We’ll be deploying numerous resources throughout the days, throughout the weeks until we take care of this problem from mounted, to bike patrol, to foot patrol, to cars in the street to drones,” Chell said.
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