A while back, we published a letter about mass murderer David Burke, right, a Jamaican immigrant who committed mass murder in what we call a Disgruntled Minority Massacre by smuggling a .44 Magnum revolver onto a commercial aircraft belonging to a company that had fired him, and murdering the pilot, killing himself and everyone on board. (I'd heard of the case — it’s mentioned in Gavin de Becker’s book The Gift Of Fear, but at the time I heard of it, I hadn’t learned not to assume that the killer of unnamed race was white.)
What I didn’t realize is that this is the second time this had happened, and that the earlier killer, Francisco Paula Gonzales, was also an immigrant.
Gonzales, left, was on the Phillipines National Sailing Team in the 1960 Olympics, and thus an immigrant. (Sports-Reference.com says he was born in Manila in 1936.) At the time of his death, however, he was working as a warehouseman in San Francisco. On May 7, 1964, depressed, in debt, and having bought a lot of life insurance and a .357 Magnum, he boarded Pacific Air Lines Flight 773, and murdered the pilots, killing himself and everyone on board.
With Flight 773 minutes from landing, Gonzales, seated directly behind the cockpit, burst into the cockpit and shot both pilots twice. Gonzales’s first bullet hit a tiny section of the frame tubing from Captain Clark’s seat. His second bullet killed Clark instantly. He then shot First Officer Andress, critically wounding him. Flying at its assigned altitude of 5,000 feet, Flight 773 went into a steep dive of 2,100 feet per minute at an airspeed of nearly 400 mph. The wounded Andress made a last frantic transmission as he tried to pull the plane out of the dive. The flight data recorder showed a sharp climb back to 3,200 feet. Gonzales most likely shot him again, fatally, before shooting himself, causing the plane to go into a final dive.
After attempting unsuccessfully to contact Flight 773, Oakland ARTCC asked another aircraft in the immediate vicinity, United Air Lines Flight 593, if they had the plane in sight. Flight 593’s flight crew responded that they did not see Flight 773, but a minute later they reported: "There’s a black, uh, cloud of smoke coming up through the undercast at, uh, three-thirty, four o’clock position right now. Looks like (an) oil or gasoline fire." Oakland ARTCC realized that the smoke spotted by the United air crew was likely caused by the crash of Pacific Air Lines Flight 773.
Flight 773 crashed into a rural hillside in southern Contra Costa County. The plane erupted in flames on impact, and dug a crater into the ground. Flight 773’s last radio message, from First Officer Andress, was deciphered through laboratory analysis: "I've been shot! We've been shot! Oh, my God, help!"[More]
