Air traffic control room fight at Reagan National Airport leads to arrest
A fight in the air traffic control tower at Reagan National Airport, or DCA, in the Washington, D.C., area led to an employee being arrested and charged with assault.
Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority said in a statement to ABC News that police arrested Damon Marsalis Gaines last week after reports of a fight breaking out in the airport's control tower.
Gaines, 40, was ultimately charged with assault and battery, officials said.
MORE: DC plane crash: A timeline of the deadly collision
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said in a statement that Gaines was put on administrative leave while the agency investigates the incident.
Further details about what led to the fight have yet to be released.
MORE: Pilots warned of safety concerns at Reagan National Airport for decades
The arrest at DCA comes months after the deadly mid-air collision between a regional jet and an Army Blackhawk Helicopter that left 70 dead.
Sixty-seven people were on the American Airlines plane, which departed from Wichita, Kansas on Jan. 29 and three Army soldiers were aboard the helicopter, which was on a training flight at the time, officials said.
ABC News' Clara McMichael contributed to this report.
Air traffic control room fight at Reagan National Airport leads to arrest originally appeared on abcnews.go.com
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8 hours ago
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Advertisement Her boyfriend at the time, Jesse Tafero, a petty criminal who had been convicted of attempted rape, was also convicted of murder. He was executed by electric chair in Florida in a notoriously botched procedure in May 1990. It took seven minutes and three jolts, and his head caught on fire. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Ms. Jacobs, whose death sentence was overturned in 1982, was ultimately freed a decade later, when a federal appeals court found that prosecutors had improperly withheld evidence from the defense. She took a plea deal rather than face retrial and was never legally exonerated. 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By the time of the fatal encounter with the Florida state trooper Phillip Black and his visiting friend, Canadian constable Donald Irwin, Ms. Jacobs's charge sheet was already long: arrests for prostitution, forgery, illegal gun possession, contributing to the delinquency of a minor (her then-4-year-old son, Eric), and drug dealing. After the killings, a loaded handgun was found in her purse. Several weapons -- two 9-mm semiautomatic handguns, a .38-caliber Special revolver, a .22-caliber Derringer, a .32-caliber revolver -- were found in the various cars linked to Tafero and Rhodes, McGarrahan wrote. Two eyewitnesses, truckers who were at the scene of the killings, said in court testimony that Rhodes couldn't have been the shooter because they saw that his hands were in the air. Forensic evidence suggested that a Taser shot, setting off the volley of fatal gunfire between the two parties, came from the back of the car, where Ms. Jacobs was sitting with her children. McGarrahan posits that Ms. Jacobs may have at least fired the Taser, which she had purchased months earlier. 'The state's theory was that Sunny fired the Taser and the gun at Trooper Black while he was attempting to subdue Jesse,' McGarrahan wrote, and that 'Jesse grabbed the gun from Sunny and continued firing at both Trooper Black and Constable Irwin.' Advertisement According to a Florida Supreme Court opinion in the case, as Ms. Jacobs was being led away after her arrest, a state trooper asked her, 'Do you like shooting troopers?' Ms. Jacobs was reported to have responded, 'We had to.' When McGarrahan went to find Ms. Jacobs at her home in Ireland many years later, 'a small, plump, wrinkled, gray-haired woman in an oversized green sweater, sweatpants, and wire-rimmed glasses' appeared in the doorway. Ms. Jacobs was wary, and mute on the subject of the Taser. When McGarrahan told her that she was simply seeking to establish the truth about the case, Ms. Jacobs responded: 'I don't think you can know that. I don't think that's knowable.' Sonia Jacobs -- who was also known as Sonia Leigh Linder, Sonia Lee Jacobs, and Sonia Lee Jacobs Linder, according to McGarrahan -- was born on Aug. 24, 1947, in the Far Rockaway neighborhood of Queens. Her parents, Herbert and Bella Jacobs, owned a textile firm. Sunny, as she was known, grew up in Elmont on Long Island. She dropped out of college in 1965 and got married, with a wedding reception at the Tavern on the Green restaurant in Manhattan, McGarrahan wrote. By 1968 -- the state of her marriage at that point is unclear -- she was living with her young son in Miami in a house owned by her parents. Her life, before and after meeting Tafero, was 'drugs, drugs and more drugs,' one informant told McGarrahan. Advertisement In 1982, after the Florida Supreme Court had overturned Ms. Jacobs's death sentence and commuted it to life in prison, her parents were killed that year in a Pan Am plane crash in New Orleans. When she was released 10 years later -- the US Court of Appeals ordered that she be given a new trial, but prosecutors offered a plea deal instead -- Ms. Jacobs had already been the subject of the '20/20' segment. In the years that followed, she taught yoga and became increasingly sought after as a speaker for her views opposing the death penalty. She moved to Ireland sometime in the 2000s. In 2007, she published her autobiography, 'Stolen Time: One Woman's Inspiring Story as an Innocent Condemned to Death.' Facebook messages to her children, Eric Linder and ChrisTina Pafero, were not immediately answered. McGarrahan, reflecting on the saga that she had spent so many years uncovering, said in an interview that with Ms. Jacobs, 'the myth has become the truth.' 'She made herself into the victim,' McGarrahan added. 'It removes the actual victims.' This article originally appeared in
