Andrew Joseph Stack

Overview

Andrew Joseph Stack III died in the crash on the same day, after he flew his Piper Dakota into Building I of the Echelon office complex in Austin, Texas, United States.

The crash killed Stack and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) manager Vernon Hunter. It injured thirteen other people, two seriously.

Timeline

• February 18, 2010 — Andrew Joseph Stack III posted a suicide note referring to “greed” with the IRS on his business website embeddedart.com; he then crashed his Piper Dakota into Building I of the Echelon office complex in Austin, Texas, killing himself and Vernon Hunter and injuring thirteen others.

The offence

Andrew Joseph Stack III flew a single-engine Piper Dakota and crashed into Building I of the Echelon office complex.

Building I contained offices for 190 IRS employees. The building was a four-story office building for the IRS field office, with other state and federal government agencies and some private businesses on the first floor.

The plane collided at full speed into Echelon I, producing a large fireball and explosion and resulting in a large fire.

Investigation

The FBI investigated the incident as a criminal matter of an assault on a federal officer and stated it was not being considered terrorism at that time.

The National Transportation Safety Board sent an investigator as well.

NORAD launched two F-16 fighter aircraft from Ellington Airport in Houston, Texas, to conduct an air patrol in response to the crash, reported as standard operating procedure in this situation.

Pre-crash events

About an hour before the crash, Stack allegedly set fire to his $230,000 house located on Dapplegrey Lane in North Austin. His North Austin house was mostly destroyed by fire, but no others.

Stack took off from Georgetown Municipal Airport after renting a hangar there for four and a half years, paying $236.25 a month to rent the hangar. His final words to the control tower were “thanks for your help, have a great day.” He told the control tower his flight would be “going southbound, sir.”

The crash occurred near the intersection of Research Boulevard (U.S. Route 183) and Mopac Expressway (Loop 1).

The aircraft and flight details

Stack piloted a Piper Dakota with aircraft registration N2889D. He also owned a Velocity Elite XL-RG plane.

An earlier Associated Press account stated that the pilot took off in a single-engine Piper Cherokee from an airport in Georgetown, about 30 miles from Austin, without filing a flight plan, and flew low over the Austin skyline before colliding with the building just before 10 a.m.

Victims and injuries

Internal Revenue Service (IRS) manager Vernon Hunter was killed in the incident. Vernon Hunter was 68 years old and was a Revenue Officer Group Manager for the IRS.

Thirteen people were reported as injured, with two critically injured.

Debris from the crash reportedly struck a car being driven on the southbound access road of Route 183 in front of the building, shattering the windshield. Another driver on the southbound access road of Route 183 had windows and sunroof shattered during the impact and had debris fall inside his car, yet escaped uninjured.

Rescue and emergency response

Robin Dehaven, a glass worker and former combat engineer for the United States Army, saw the collision while commuting to his job and used the ladder on his truck to rescue five people from the building.

The Travis County Hazardous Materials Team—an inter-agency group of firefighters from outside the City of Austin—observed Stack’s low and fast flight and heard the blast impact, then responded by attacking the fire and initiating search-and-rescue.

Several City of Austin fire engines for the area of the Echelon building were already deployed at the fire at Stack’s home at the time of the impact.

Georgetown Municipal Airport was temporarily evacuated while a bomb disposal team searched Stack’s abandoned vehicle.

An inspection into the Echelon building’s structural integrity was concluded six days after the incident and a preliminary decision was made to repair the building rather than demolish it. Those repairs were substantially complete by December 2011.

Suicide note / manifesto

On the morning of the crash, Stack posted a suicide note on his website embeddedart.com.

The HTML source code of the web page indicated the letter was composed using Microsoft Word starting two days prior, February 16, at 19:24Z (1:24 p.m. CST), and saved 27 times with the last being February 18 at 06:42Z (12:42 a.m. CST).

The suicide note criticized the government, the bailout of financial institutions, politicians, and the conglomerate companies of General Motors, Enron and Arthur Andersen, unions, drug and health care insurance companies, and the Catholic Church. It described his life as an engineer, including his meeting with a poor widow who never got the pension benefits she was promised, the effect of the Section 1706 of Tax Reform Act of 1986 on independent contractor engineers, and the September 11 attacks airline bailouts that benefited airlines but not suffering engineers.

The suicide note included criticism of the Federal Aviation Administration and the George W. Bush administration and included a call for violent revolt. It described issues with taxes, debt, and the IRS and referenced a long-running feud with the organization.

The suicide note ended with:

" 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. The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed. –Joe Stack (1956-2010), 02/18/2010"

An Associated Press account quoted the suicide note beginning with:

"If you're reading this, you're no doubt asking yourself, 'Why did this have to happen?'"

The Associated Press account also quoted:

"I choose not to keep looking over my shoulder at 'big brother' while he strips my carcass."

The suicide note included the passage:

"violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer."

A longer “Full Joseph Andrew Stack’s suicide manifesto” was included in the material, beginning:

Additional personal background

Stack worked as an embedded software consultant.

He grew up in Pennsylvania, had two brothers and two sisters, was orphaned at age four, and spent some time at a Catholic orphanage.

He graduated from the Milton Hershey School in 1974 and studied engineering at Harrisburg Area Community College from 1975 to 1977 but did not graduate.

His first marriage to Ginger Stack ended in divorce and produced a daughter, Samantha Bell.

In 2007 Stack remarried to Sheryl Housh, who had a daughter from a previous marriage.

In 1985, Stack and his first wife incorporated Prowess Engineering.

In 1994, Stack failed to file a state tax return.

In 1998, the Stacks divorced and a year later his wife filed Chapter 11 Bankruptcy, citing IRS liabilities totaling nearly $126,000.

In 1995, Stack started Software Systems Service Corp, which was suspended in 2004 for non-payment of state taxes.

A separate account stated that in the 1980s Stack and his former wife Ginger formed a branch of the Universal Life Church Inc., which the IRS declared an illegal tax shelter; they sued the U.S. government to defend the tax-exempt status of the “home church.”

In 1988, after five years of litigation, the Stacks were ordered to pay $14,446 in back taxes from 1981, 1982 and 1983, and untold penalties and interest for fraud and negligence.

Aircraft and airport-related details

Stack obtained a pilot’s license in 1994.

He had been using Georgetown Municipal Airport for four and a half years.

In the material, there was speculation that Stack replaced seats on his aircraft with extra drums of fuel prior to the collision.

Stack’s accountant confirmed he was being audited by the IRS for failure to report income at the time of the incident.

Post-crash reactions and statements

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued a statement that the incident did not appear to be linked to organized international terrorist groups. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs reaffirmed what Homeland Security said, and President Barack Obama was briefed on the incident. The President expressed concern and commended the courageous actions of the first responders.

Austin police chief Art Acevedo stated that the incident was not the action of a major terrorist organization and cited “some heroic actions on the part of federal employees” that “will be told at the appropriate time.”

The FBI stated it was investigating the incident “as a criminal matter of an assault on a federal officer” and that it was not being considered terrorism at this time.

Two members of the United States House of Representatives made statements to the contrary:

• Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) stated: “Like the larger-scale tragedy in Oklahoma City, this was a cowardly act of domestic terrorism.”
• Mike McCaul (R-Texas) told a reporter: “it sounds like it [was a terrorist attack] to me.”

Nihad Awad, Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), asked the federal government to classify this as an act of terrorism and stated on February 19:

"Whenever an individual or group attacks civilians in order to make a political statement, that is an act of terror. Terrorism is terrorism, regardless of the faith, race or ethnicity of the perpetrator or the victims. If a Muslim had carried out the IRS attack, it would have surely been labeled an act of terrorism."

Georgetown University Professor Bruce Hoffman stated:

“There has to be some political motive and it has to send a broader message that seeks some policy change. From what I've heard, that doesn't appear to be the case. It appears he was very mad at the [IRS] and this was a cathartic outburst of violence. His motivation was the key.”

A USA Today headline used the term “a chilling echo of terrorism.”

The company hosting embeddedart.com, T35 hosting, took Stack’s website offline “due to the sensitive nature of the events that transpired in Texas this morning and in compliance with a request from the FBI.”

Several groups supporting Stack on Facebook appeared and were immediately shut down by Facebook staff.

In an interview with ABC’s Good Morning America, Stack’s adult daughter Samantha Bell stated initially that she considered her father to be a hero because she felt that now people might listen, and she agreed with his actions about speaking out against “injustice” and “the government.” She later retracted aspects of her statement, saying her father was “not a hero” and adding, “We are mourning for Vernon Hunter.”

Iowa congressman Steve King made statements regarding Stack including:

“I think if we'd abolished the IRS back when I first advocated it, he wouldn't have a target for his airplane. And I'm still for abolishing the IRS, I've been for it for thirty years and I'm for a national sales tax (in its place).”

Noam Chomsky cited Stack’s suicide letter as indicative of public sentiment and urged people to “help” the Joseph Stacks of the world get involved in constructive popular movements instead of letting the Joseph Stacks “destroy themselves, and maybe the world,” in order to prevent violence.

Economic costs to the IRS

The IRS spent more than $38.6 million because of the 2010 Austin suicide attack.

For the immediate response, document recovery, and to resume operations at the center, the IRS spent USD $6,421,942, including USD $3,258,213 for document recovery.

The IRS spent USD $32.3 million to improve IRS building security across the United States, including USD $30.5 million for more security guards.

An additional USD $1,236,634 was spent on a security risk assessment to be performed by the private Georgia-based logistical and engineering services firm Unified Consultants Group, Inc.

A July 25, 2012 audit released by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration determined that the contract was mismanaged by the IRS and that the security-review process had multiple problems, with many sites not inspected by the contractor. The audit placed blame on individuals responsible for defining, negotiating, and administering the contract, and stated potentially 100% of funds were used inefficiently and security improvements may not have been ineffective.

Lawsuit after the attack

Five days after Valerie Hunter’s husband Vernon Hunter’s death, Valerie Hunter filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Sheryl Mann Stack, Andrew Joseph Stack’s widow, in District Court.

The lawsuit alleged that Sheryl had a duty to “avoid a foreseeable risk of injury to others,” including her late husband, and failed to do so by not warning others about her late husband.

The lawsuit also mentioned that Stack was required by law to fly his plane at an altitude 1,000 feet (305 m) above the highest obstacle.

At a March 8, 2010 benefit event, Stack’s widow Sheryl publicly offered condolences for the victims of the attack.

Other observations and reported perceptions

In the materials, multiple people described the scene and immediate impact, including:

• Peggy Walker, an IRS revenue officer sitting at her desk, stated: “The ceiling caved in and windows blew in. We got up and ran.”
• Gerry Cullen described the plane striking the building and “vanished in a fireball.”
• Matt Farney said: “I figured he was going to buzz the apartments or he was showing off,” and “It was insane. It didn't look like he was out of control or anything.”
• Michelle Santibanez said she felt vibrations from the crash, and she and her co-workers ran to the windows where they witnessed a scene that reminded them of 9/11, describing: “It was the same kind of scenario, with window panels falling out and desks falling out and paperwork flying.”
• Andrew Jacobson, an IRS revenue officer on the second floor, described finding that “about six people couldn't use the stairwell because of smoke and debris” and that 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,” adding that his “bloody hands were bandaged.”

Aftermath and building repair status

The building was repaired by December 2011.

The materials also reported that the debris impact shattered a windshield and other windows and sunroof on vehicles on the southbound access road of Route 183, and that debris fell inside a car where another driver escaped uninjured.