Hiding in plain sight: A 30-year-old hijacking mystery solved on 9/11

A breezy and seasonally satisfying Tuesday, September 11, 2001, began with the promise that beat reporters crave – the knowledge that my story would appear on the front page. Riding high from the previous night attending Michael Jackson’s 30th-anniversary concerts at Madison Square Garden, my editor implored that I go straight to a school in Mount Vernon, NY. She knew how to spoil a great evening watching the greatest pop music entertainer ever reunite with his brothers for a spectacular night at the World’s Most Famous Arena. In Mount Vernon, my editor told me that I’d find the compelling story of Patrick Dolan Critton, a 54-year-old teacher who for 30 years hid as a fugitive in plain sight. Critton belonged to a Black liberation group that, in 1971, allegedly robbed a bank and engaged in a shootout with cops. The group then hijacked an airplane to escape arrest. But there he was, teaching high school in New York as if he had never been on the FBI’s Most Wanted List and oblivious to the desperate desires the NYPD maintained for his capture. Yes, this had A-1, above the fold, written all over it with my byline. Early that morning, I gathered the pertinent details and headed back to my bureau located in nearby New Rochelle. Indeed, I possessed all the goods, and if we were a tabloid, I’d have “The Wood.” Entering the office shortly after 9 a.m. I discovered that my colleagues were standing around the bureau’s wall-mounted television. The first terrorist-controlled airplane had just struck the Twin Towers. “Wow, what an accident,” a colleague remarked. Moments later, after the second airplane struck the towers, one colleague shirked, “That’s no accident!” It certainly was not. I had been to the World Trade Center, been in those towers many times, and right before our eyes, they were reduced to rubble. Shocking and completely unnerving, my colleagues and I realized that thousands of lives probably were vanquished. They were. More than 3,000 eventually died. The terrorists weren’t finished. Far from it. Another airplane would rock the western side of the Pentagon […]

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