Officials on Tuesday identified the man fatally struck on a Denver airport runway Friday as 41-year-old Michael Mott and said he is believed to have died by suicide. Chief Medical Examiner Sterling McLaren said the cause of death was multiple blunt and sharp force injuries.
The collision happened at 11:19 p.m. Friday, as a Frontier Airlines Airbus A321 was accelerating for takeoff at Denver International Airport on a scheduled flight to Los Angeles International Airport. Twelve people aboard the plane were injured during the evacuation that followed, officials said.
Denver International Airport CEO Phil Washington said an alarm went off at around 11:10 p.m. Friday and an operator on duty reviewed it, identifying a herd of deer just outside the perimeter fence. He said the operator did not initially see the trespasser, and that the camera view was alternating between the wildlife and the individual.
Washington said the area included ditches and a gulch, or ravine, between the fence line and the runway, and that the person was out of view for a bit. He said it took approximately 15 seconds for Mott to jump over the 8-foot fence topped with barbed wire, and about two minutes from climbing the fence to being struck by the plane. The runway is about two miles from the terminal.
The security video released by officials showed a figure approaching the runway and starting to cross it at walking pace before the Airbus swept in from the left and one of its engines caught fire. Officials said a note has not been found at the scene, and none of Mott’s belongings, including a vehicle, have been located by law enforcement yet.
Washington said Mott has had some law enforcement contact in the Denver metropolitan area. He also said the airport has 36 miles of fence across 53 square miles of property, and that the airport will conduct a review to better understand what happened and how the incident unfolded.
Washington acknowledged that the airport has had fence-jumpers before, but said they were apprehended quickly. He said the questions raised after the crash — including whether the fence should be electrified or made taller, or whether razor wire should replace barbed wire — will be weighed against a security system he described as layered, not one meant to be lethal.
The National Transportation Safety Board said it will not investigate the incident. With the facts now public, the remaining issue for Denver is not whether the runway strike was real, but how a man reached an active runway and stayed there long enough to be hit in one of the country’s busiest airport operations.
