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Flight to LA grounded, unruly passenger arrested
A flight from Virginia to LAX was grounded in Colorado after an allegedly drunk passenger started hurling racial slurs and waving a skateboard at plane staff. Other passengers talk about what happened.
GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. - A flight headed to Los Angeles had to be diverted on Wednesday because of what police called an unruly passenger.
What we know:
Breeze Airways flight MX704 was headed from Norfolk, Virginia, to Los Angeles International Airport Wednesday morning, when the flight was forced to land in Grand Junction, Colorado.
Grand Junction police got to the airport just after 11 a.m. local time. According to the department, the plane had to land because a drunk passenger was "yelling racist slurs at airline staff while waving a skateboard."
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Staff tried to restrain the man twice, officers said, but he was able to break out both times.
Officers arrested the man at the Grand Junction Regional Airport. The FBI is now investigating the incident.
What they're saying:
Jason, one of the other passengers on the plane, said the man spat on him and threw things at him.
"He was pretty intoxicated," Jason said. "I witnessed him drink at least five or six different alcoholic beverages. He was sitting right beside me."
"All I heard was the captain saying ‘We are no longer going to be selling alcohol,’" said another passenger. "And I look over to my left and it's this man, he's fidgeting and the men behind me are like ‘Yo, he’s drunk.' And then the next thing you know he's belligerent, he's doing too much, he's using racial slurs. He's in people's faces. And then the linebacker dude that was sitting in 17C literally picked this man up underneath his armpits and then put him down like he was in a car seat. It was amazing."
Another passenger named Ray was the man who confronted the unruly passenger. Ray said he jumped into action when he heard the flight attendants asked him for help. Ray said he "had to sit him down," because he was concerned for his child on the plane as well as the other kids.
"I knew he would react to me because he was going after the adults who were not so big. The ones he thought he could bully."
Dig deeper:
While the Grand Junction Police Department said that the man never physically assaulted anyone on the plane, Breeze Airways said in a statement to FOX 11 that one flight attendant and one passenger were "evaluated for minor injuries."
What we don't know:
Officials did not identify the man who was arrested.
What's next:
The flight is scheduled to continue its journey to LAX, and is expected to land just before 6 p.m. local time, nearly 12 hours after it first took off from Virginia.
"Our focus now is on taking care of our Crew and remaining Guests who have been unfairly inconvenienced by this unfortunate event and getting them safely to their final destination as quickly as possible," the airline's statement said.
The Source: Information in this story is from a Facebook post by the Grand Junction Police Department, a statement from Breeze Airways to FOX 11 and flight information from Flight Aware.