Richard O'Lenick was covered in a stranger's blood two hours into an American Airlines flight from Dallas to Newark on Sept. 3. The 53-year-old from Sparta was attempting to wrap duct tape around an unruly, aggressive passenger who'd already bitten O'Lenick's travel partner and had attempted to choke another passenger sitting in his row.
"He looked at me and made a comment about Jesus and said, 'We're all gonna die. The plane is gonna crash," O'Lenick recalled days later from the office of the Woodland Park gun range he owns, Gun for Hire. "Emotionally I threw that comment out of my brain. I said, 'Knock it off, we'll be fine. You'll see when we get to the ground; we're gonna meet a bunch of new friends, and they're all gonna be dressed in blue."
What would you do if a person sitting near you on an airplane started to hurl slurs and became physically violent with those around them? There's no way to prepare for it, O'Lenick said.
"This is definitely a first, for sure. Hopefully last, but definitely a first."
O'Lenick and his travel partner, Juan Mejia, who is a manager at Gun for Hire and a retired Weehawken police officer, were on the second leg of a return trip from Reno, where they'd attended a trade show. About two hours into the three-and-a-half-hour flight, O'Lenick said he heard a passenger starting to raise his voice two rows behind him.
"It didn't seem exactly normal, but it didn't come across like it was at a level where anybody needed to get involved," he said. "But that changed really quickly within a few minutes."
The unruly passenger continued to curse more and act more belligerently, O'Lenick said, even as flight attendants came over to try to calm him down.
"After 10 minutes of that, he was starting to use homophobic slurs and racial slurs and so we all started to understand towards the end of that, ok, this is getting more serious now," he said. "I think everybody was kind of shocked when he started yelling out the vulgarity."
O'Lenick said the man then put his hands around the neck of the passenger next to him, which "triggered everything to really start getting serious." A woman in the row in front of the chaos, O'Lenick said, turned around to slap his hands away from the passenger's neck; O'Lenick said the man then started attempting to hit her.
It was then that Mejia jumped into the fray, moving into the row with the aggressive passenger. O'Lenick said he followed behind and "kind of scooted myself in between the passenger and the seat." The passenger bit Mejia, and so O'Lenick used his body weight to restrain him.
Over the course of "15 or 20 minutes," O'Lenick estimated, the two tried to de-escalate the situation, hoping that by seeing he was outnumbered, he'd calm down. No dice.
"We were doing everything we could to get him to try to calm down a little bit and take it down, but throughout the entire process he just wasn't settling," he said.
Eventually, flight attendants brought over hand ties, which Mejia and O'Lenick applied to the passenger. To prevent more biting, flight attendants offered a piece of duct tape; Mejia suggested not putting it on the passenger's mouth as it would restrict his airflow, so instead, the two, with the help of a third person seated behind the commotion, wrapped the passenger to his seat.
"He just kept going, he just kept continuing to try to fight and ultimately that led to us having to duct tape his head," O'Lenick said.
After fully restraining the passenger, O'Lenick realized he was covered in the passenger's blood, so quickly asked flight-mates for disinfecting wipes, and went to change his pants.
"There was blood all over," he said. "My pants were absolutely covered in blood to the point I had to throw my jeans out."
The flight was diverted to Baltimore/Washington Thurgood Marshall International Airport (BWI) in Maryland due to "a disruptive customer," who was eventually deplaned with the help of law enforcement, according to an emailed response from American Airlines to The Arizona Republic.
Soon after, the aggressive passenger, Layne Arthur Lundeen, 64, was charged Sept. 4, in Maryland on suspicion of second-degree assault and disorderly conduct, both misdemeanors, according to court records. Lundeed, a realtor, was fired in response to the episode, according to The Republic.
O'Lenick said he and Mejia are fine after their encounter on the flight, both physically and mentally, even if it took a while for the adrenalin to wear off. O'Lenick iterated that he hopes Lundeen "gets the help that he needs."
"We did not get in this situation to become confrontational," he said. "Nobody wanted that, but we do hope he gets the help he needs with whatever was happening.
A bit ironically, O'Lenick said the episode brought two things he generally loathes to the forefront.
"I'm not a spotlight guy," he said after mentioning the torrent of media calls he's received since. "There are two things I don't love: being in the spotlight and the other thing is flying."
Matt Cortina is a reporter for NorthJersey.com/The Record. Reach him at [email protected].
This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: 'Blood all over': Local men restrain unruly passenger on Newark flight