The off-duty pilot who allegedly attempted to shoot down a full-capacity plane has spoken openly about the bizarre incident, claiming he thought he would snap out of a mushroom trip-induced delusional state if the flight crashed.
“I thought it would cut both engines, the plane would start crashing and I would wake up,” Joseph Emerson, 44, told the New York Times in an interview from the Portland County Jail, where he is being held. 83 counts of attempted murder.
The longtime pilot claims he was experiencing a mental breakdown that lasted several days and a spiral of paranoia that left him wondering if what he was experiencing was real or just a dream when he carried out the Oct. 22 event.
Emerson’s crisis began two days earlier when he took magic mushrooms with friends during a weekend getaway to remember the life of one of his deceased friends.
His friend’s death in 2018 had plunged Emerson into deep grief that led therapists to encourage him to seek medical treatment for depression, something he avoided out of fear that Virgin America’s strict guidelines against such prescriptions would prevent him from flying. .
Joseph David Emerson claims he was experiencing a magic mushroom-induced psychotic break when he attempted to crash the plane.
Instead, he opted to self-medicate and tried the hallucinogen for the first time, which only started an episode that lasted a week.
Emerson began to feel deep unease and the feeling that his friends were mocking him and potentially plotting to hurt him.
“I felt afraid of them,” he said, adding that he also “started to get the feeling that this wasn’t real.”
“I thought about a lot of traumatic things in that moment where I thought, ‘Am I dead? Is this hell?’” she said. “I’m reliving that trauma.”
Emerson faces 83 counts of attempted murder, one for each of the lives on the flight. Joseph Emerson/Facebook
Emerson headed to the airport, where his feeling that he was in purgatory grew stronger. He felt that nothing made sense, like the directions his GPS gave him and the way the flight attendants boarded the plane.
He texted a friend saying he thought he was having a panic attack.
The pilots noticed that he seemed increasingly agitated during the hours-long flight from Washington to Oregon, until he finally collapsed.
“I’m not fine,” Emerson said before rushing to activate the plane’s two firefighting handles in mid-flight while sitting in the cockpit, designed to cut off the fuel supply and shut down both engines.
Emerson repeatedly asked staff, police officers and his wife if the things he was experiencing were real or if he was dreaming. Joseph Emerson/Facebook
The pilots grabbed his wrists and pulled him away from the controls, and Emerson eventually asked a flight attendant to hold him until the pilots could make an emergency landing.
“You have to handcuff me right now, or everything will go wrong,” he said, according to a police officer who interviewed the flight crew.
Emerson continued to act erratically and drank coffee directly from the coffee pot until an assistant stopped him.
He asked the staff if everything was real or if he was in a nightmare and tried to reach the emergency door, thinking that if he jumped he would wake up.
Emerson had been dealing with untreated depression since the death of his close friend in 2018. Joseph Emerson/Facebook
“I’m having a mental breakdown and tried to turn off both engines on my flight home,” he wrote in a text message to his friends, and in another he wrote to his wife: “I’ve made a big mistake.”
Emerson was arrested on the emergency landing, but continued to question whether his conversations with the officers were real.
“If this is real, and all of this was real, then I have done something to myself that is unfathomable,” he told police.
Inside the airport detention room, Emerson stripped naked, tried to jump out a window, urinated on himself, and masturbated, all in the hopes of being startled awake.
Emerson also tried to open the emergency exit and jump out of the plane during his terrifying flight.Joseph Emerson/Facebook
He repeatedly asked his wife on the phone, “Is this real?” and he started singing in the middle of the conversation.
It wasn’t until five days after consuming the mushrooms that Emerson returned to reality.
“I am horrified that these actions put me and others at risk,” he said.
“That team was faced with a situation for which there is no manual, checklist or written procedure. And they did an exemplary job keeping me and the rest of the people on that plane safe.”
Emerson is being held without bail on the state charges, one for each of the lives that were on the plane during his psychotic break.
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Source: vtt.edu.vn