Jan 14 2009
We know how to put a small town on the map…
Once again, my quiet little Podunk town of Milton, Florida is making headlines with death and disaster. Or is it?
Sunday night around 10 PM I received a panicked telephone call from a friend. Since downtown Milton was finished burning down (there was a flare-up on Thursday morning, but there’s really nothing left to burn at this point), I wondered what the latest problem could be. She asked me if I could hear low-flying aircraft. Of course I could - I live near a military flight training base - but they did indeed seem lower than usual.
We checked with our various local sources (including but not limited to police dispatchers, friends who work on the aforementioned military base, and the local news) to discover that a plane had in fact gone down, and our locally stationed service people were looking for the pilot. Apparently two military planes had seen the other aircraft (originally presumed to be a U. S. Customs or Border Control plane) go down, but the pilot had not been located.
Two days later, the story has national coverage. [I tried to embed the video coverage here, but for some reason I just can’t get it together.]
I’m sure that most moral and ethical codes bear some objection to faking one’s death to avoid debt, then attempt suicide several days later, but I’m not going to touch that issue today. Whether or not there is any redemption after suicide is too big a question for the goat and I, so we’ll stick to what we know.
We know that the pilot, Marcus Schrenker, displayed a gross disregard for human life and property when he quite selfishly crashed a plane in my rural town. Sure, he chose a “safe” marshy area as his crash pad, but he didn’t know when he bailed out of that plane whether or not my fellow Miltonians would be out enjoying a late night boat ride or some other foolishness that does NOT warrant a death sentence. In the end, no one was hurt, but I can imagine there was plenty of jet fuel spilled in the Blackwater River. And I know for a fact that he wasted the time not only of the Santa Rosa County Sheriff’s Department, but also that of the pilots who rushed to the scene to escort his plane out of an emergency that didn’t exist. Waste frustrates me, and Mr. Schrenker acted very selfishly when he destroyed a small patch of East Milton to run away from his problems in Indiana.
