A Bizarre and Suspicious Flight

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

All seemed well when Washington lawyer Thomas Root, 36, climbed into a Cessna 210 Centurion and took off from National Airport at 6:33 a.m. Thursday. He often piloted himself on business trips, and the 156-mile jaunt to Rocky Mount, N.C., that his flight plan called for appeared routine. Two hours into his trip, however -- and some 45 minutes after he was expected to land -- Root radioed the Federal Aviation Administration at Leesburg, Va., that he was suffering chest pains and having difficulty breathing.

As his plane crossed North Carolina and headed south over the Atlantic, it picked up a small convoy of escorting military craft that tried to make radio contact but failed. Root appeared to have suffered a heart attack; pilots saw / him sprawled in the Cessna's cockpit, apparently unconscious. For almost four hours the Cessna droned over the Atlantic on automatic pilot at about 10,000 ft. Finally, it ran out of fuel 15 miles from the Bahamian island of Eleuthera and some 800 miles from Washington. It spiraled on a sharp angle into the sea and sank within six minutes.

Then came what seemed a miracle. Four medics who had been following the flight for its last hour aboard an Air Force C-130 cargo plane parachuted into the ocean, expecting at most to recover a body. To their amazement, they saw Root swimming toward them. Coast Guard Captain Dr. James Rahman later theorized that carbon monoxide leaking into the Cessna's cabin caused Root to pass out but that the crash revived him.

He was bleeding from the abdomen and had fractured ribs, injuries presumed to have been caused by the crash. Root was flown to a hospital in Hollywood, Fla., where he was reported first in critical, then in stable condition. Wife Kathy, 35, sent him a tongue-in-cheek message: "Root, you really did it this time."

But on Friday Hollywood police chief Richard Witt made a startling report. Exploratory surgery had led doctors to conclude that Root's injuries resulted from a gunshot wound -- apparently inflicted in the air and at such close range that a powder burn surrounded the entrance hole.

After quizzing Root for 40 minutes, Andrew Alston, an investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board, said the pilot admitted keeping a .32- cal. revolver in his plane's glove compartment. But Root insisted that he recalled nothing about his flight from the moment he blacked out from "a shortness of breath" until it ended in the water.

Had Root tried to commit suicide and staged an elaborate show to make his death look like an accident? Brett Geer, a brother-in-law who talked with Root in the hospital Friday, speculated that the lawyer's gun may have gone off during the crash. Root, a father of three, is an avid gun collector. Last April, in a check of the Virginia hangar where he kept his plane, the police found 35 weapons; one was unregistered.

One possible motive for suicide came to light when North Carolina's secretary of state disclosed that his office was investigating Root's role in an alleged security fraud. The FCC had rebuked him for mishandling procedures in his law practice, which specializes in helping investors get radio-station licenses. Root, who is said to be in financial difficulty, is under investigation by the U.S. Customs Service as a possible drug smuggler.

Whether these problems had anything to do with the bizarre journey remained a mystery at week's end. But if Root's flight does turn out to have been a suicide mission, no one will be more shocked than the rescuers who saw him madly swimming for dear life.

With reporting by Bruce Henderson/Hollywood, Fla.