Denver was the place where a forty-one-year-old man named Michael Mott made a final, desperate choice last Friday night. Around 11:15 p.m., he climbed over an eight-foot fence topped with barbed wire at the Denver International Airport. He moved quickly and ended up right on an active runway. Just two minutes later, a Frontier Airlines jet headed for Los Angeles struck him while it was moving down the tarmac.
The impact was incredibly violent and sparked a fire in one of the plane’s engines. This forced everyone on the Airbus A321 to evacuate immediately. While the passengers were rushing to get off the plane, several of them ended up with injuries. It was a chaotic scene that left a lot of people shaken up as they realized just how close they came to a major disaster.
Medical examiners had a tough job identifying the body because the injuries were so severe. They eventually used fingerprints to confirm it was Mott. The Chief Medical Examiner, Sterling McLaren, reported that the cause of death was multiple blunt and sharp force injuries. On Tuesday, the official ruling came back as a suicide, confirming that Mott intended to end his life that night.
Local records show that Mott had a very long and difficult history with the law in Colorado. His trouble started over twenty years ago and included everything from trespassing to more serious violent crimes. He was someone the police knew well, but nobody expected things to end in such a public and tragic way at the airport.
The airport’s security system actually did go off when Mott climbed the fence. However, a security operator thought the alarm was just caused by some local wildlife and didn’t realize a person had broken in. Because of this mistake, the airport is now doing a massive review of its security procedures to make sure nothing like this ever happens again.
Right now, Denver Police Chief Ron Thomas and his team are trying to figure out why Mott did it. They have been talking to his friends and family members to see what his state of mind was like lately. So far, investigators have not found a suicide note, which leaves a lot of unanswered questions for those who knew him.
Detectives are still looking through surveillance footage and asking the public for any information about where Mott was in the days leading up to the incident. They want to piece together the final hours of a man who spent years struggling with the system. It is a sad ending to a life that was clearly filled with a lot of personal turmoil and pain.
