What began as an ordinary flight home quickly spiraled into a midair nightmare.
Richard Olenick was aboard American Airlines Flight 618 when a passenger’s increasingly erratic behavior turned violent, ultimately leading Olenick and fellow passenger Juan Mejia to spring into action. Olenick, who helped restrain the man accused of attacking Rabbi Jonathan Cahn, recently recounted the frightening ordeal in an interview with Gun For Hire.
“It was a little bit of a crazy experience, as you can imagine,” Olenick said. “We were heading back from the trade show in Reno. This was the second part of the journey. Juan and I had flown into Dallas, and this was the second part of the trip back home to Newark.”
For roughly two hours, Olenick said there was nothing to indicate what was coming.
“For the first two hours, [it] was relatively quiet and normal. Nothing out of the ordinary,” he said. “I’m sure Juan and I had our headphones on, and we were just doing our thing and everything was all kind of normal.”
Then the atmosphere inside the cabin began to change.
“We were seated in row two … we started hearing one of the passengers behind us getting very vocal, getting very loud. He was starting to use profanity, and he was starting to use homophobic and racial slurs,” Olenick said.
Looking back, Olenick remembered hearing portions of a conversation involving religion before the situation deteriorated. At the time, however, nothing about the exchange appeared alarming.
“I did hear some brief conversations or brief comments that I overheard about religion, but of course at that point it was nothing. It was nothing abnormal,” he said. “So, it wasn’t weird, right? It was just regular two people having a conversation about religion, which wasn’t an issue. They weren’t getting loud, they weren’t raising their voice.”
Within minutes, however, Olenick and Juan realized this was no longer an ordinary disagreement.
“It was probably about five minutes into the escalation … where we really understood something was not right,” Olenick continued. “Both seatbelts, both Juan and I took our seatbelts off.”
The two men began preparing themselves for the possibility that they might have to intervene.
“We started to get ready to prepare for whatever was going to come,” Olenick said. “We of course hoped that it wouldn’t escalate, but of course didn’t know.”
Then came the moment that changed everything.
“What ultimately got us out of our seat very quickly was this passenger reached over to the passenger to his right, to the aisle seat, and put his hand around his throat and started choking the guy,” Olenick recalled.
A woman sitting in the third row jumped up and began striking the man in an attempt to make him stop choking the passenger. According to Olenick, the man then turned on her.
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“The woman that was in the third row, which was between us, she got up and she started hitting that guy to get him to stop choking the passenger, and he then turned and started hitting her,” Olenick said.
That was the breaking point.
“As soon as that happened, Juan immediately jumps out of his chair and he immediately started engaging, and I immediately got up and I started following through as well.”
Juan moved into position to prevent the passenger from continuing to strike others, while Olenick found himself directly in front of the struggling man.
“I ended up literally right in front of the gentleman,” he said. “My first instinct was to take away his ability to use his legs to fight us because he was using his legs. Then my second thought was to start working on his arms and his hands.”
But restraining him would prove to be anything but simple.
Flight attendants provided the men with plastic restraints, according to Olenick, as the passenger continued struggling against them.
“He’s yelling, ‘Why are you doing this? Why are you doing this? Stop! Get off me!’ To which our response was, ‘If you stop resisting us, we will.’”
Then came the duct tape—the detail that would become one of the most extraordinary elements of the Flight 618 story.
Olenick said a flight attendant began tearing off tape, and someone suggested taping the passenger’s mouth. Juan immediately rejected the idea, concerned about the man’s ability to breathe.
“Juan said, ‘No, we’re not going to tape his mouth.’ He didn’t want to interfere with the gentleman breathing and his health because obviously we’re not there for that,” Olenick said.
Instead, they began wrapping the man’s torso in duct tape in an effort to keep him from hurting anyone else.
“At each step we were hoping that he would de-escalate and just calm down a little bit,” Olenick said.
He didn’t.
“Believe it or not, even with duct tape up around almost to his shoulders he was still fighting. He was still resisting. He was still trying to engage with us,” Olenick said.
When the man could no longer effectively fight with his arms and shoulders, Olenick said he began attempting to bite them, forcing the group to further restrain his head.
The plane eventually diverted to Baltimore, where police boarded and took custody of the passenger. Yet even then, according to Olenick, the fight was not over.
“We start explaining, ‘Listen, we have to start working out a plan for the transition because he’s been fighting and resisting the entire time,’” Olenick recalled.
By that point, the passenger had been restrained with plastic cuffs, duct tape and, during the transfer, police handcuffs.
“He fought them as well,” Olenick said.
The aftermath inside the cabin was difficult to miss. Olenick said the passenger had suffered cuts at some point during the confrontation and there was “a lot of blood.”
Yet after an ordeal involving choking, punching, attempted biting, restraints, duct tape, a diverted flight and police intervention, Olenick’s final words were not ones of vengeance.
“We do hope that this gentleman does get the help that he needs,” he said. “Nobody wanted this to affect the gentleman the way it has.”
What began as an apparently ordinary conversation about religion erupted into violence thousands of feet in the air, forcing complete strangers to make split-second decisions to protect the people around them.
For Olenick and the others who stepped into the chaos, there was little time to debate what to do. When the attack turned physical, they acted, and their firsthand account now reveals just how intense the struggle aboard Flight 618 became before the plane ever touched down in Baltimore.
Abby Trivett is a writer and editor for Charisma Media and has a passion for sharing the gospel through the written word. She holds two degrees from Regent University, a B.A. in Communication with a concentration in Journalism and a Master of Arts in Journalism. She is the author of the newly released book, The Power of Suddenly: Discover How God Can Change Everything in a Moment. For interviews and media inquiries, please contact [email protected].
