Kamikaze kid pilot commits
acne-induced suicide?
'Official story' once again does not
'cohere.'
by Daniel Hopsicker
January 10--Tampa Florida
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.
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