In 2014, Boston celebrated a grim anniversary on Patriot’s Day, at the running of the Boston Marathon. Twenty-five years ago tonight, the city experienced another terrorist attack, this time from the air.
The Boston Red Sox had just suffered a six-to-two loss to the Minnesota Twins. Fans were streaming out of Fenway Park by 10:02 that evening. Andrew Smith was walking along Newbury Street, when he heard a popping noise from the sky. ”About two seconds later, several shell casings landed all around. I realized that the guy was shooting out of his plane,” Smith said. He notified the Boston Police. ”Nobody believed me at first. I didn’t believe it at first.”
For the next three hours, Alfred J. Hunter III would hold the city of Boston hostage.
Al Hunter’s troubles began in December of 1988. He had assaulted his wife, Elvira, 26, in their home in Ipswich after ordering her not to change the channel on the couple’s television. On May 9, the divorced couple appeared in court, where the 42-year-old postal worker was sentenced to two years’ probation.
At 9:30 that evening, Hunter arrived at his former wife’s residence and shot her seven times, killing her in front of the couple’s five-year-old son. He then commandeered two different automobiles, and drove to what is now the Beverly Municipal Airport on the Beverly/Danvers town line.
There, he found Robert Golder, a 21-year-old flight instructor. Brandishing the same AK-47 he used to kill his wife, Hunter demanded that Golder fire up a Cessna 152. “”He wanted me to start the airplane for him,” Golder told the Associated Press. “He told me not to do anything stupid. He said he had just killed some people.”
Hunter then took off into the night. Within half an hour, he made a pass over the airport in Plymouth, then headed back toward the brightest target in the region: The city of Boston, where he worked at the South Boston Postal Annex.
Shortly Andrew Smith had reported his story to the Boston Police, WBZ cameraman Scott Hess was coming through the Allston-Brighton tolls, on his way back to the WBZ studios in Allston, near the end of his 4:00 pm to midnight shift. “We got a call that said Mike Macklin [Ed. – a long-time Boston news reporter] was at Daisy Buchanan’s on Newbury Street and he was talking to a guy who said someone was shooting at him out of a plane,” says Hess.
Police in the area began to piece together what was happening, after Golder reported the incident in Beverly, and Elvira Hunter’s body was found in Ipswich.
Hess says that at some point during the evening, they figured out that Hunter was a postal worker at the Congress Street Post Office, so he raced there to set up a camera, on the theory that maybe Hunter would take a few pot shots at his employer. “I remember setting up my tripod behind these big aluminum poles in front of the post office,” he says. “I wanted something between him and me if he did actually show up.”
Curtis Ackerman felt the same way. He was a photographer with the Boston Herald at the time: “I took my photos at the Postal facility behind South Station. I do have some recollection,” he said, “especially taking cover behind the concrete garbage barrel containers. I also remember, being the daredevil — or stupid — photographer that I was, standing straight up, camera fixed on the plane, waiting for his next pass and taking photos.”
And Hunter did. Hess is a pilot and says that he quickly recognized the sound of the approaching aircraft. “I saw a rotating beacon coming down, and it was him,” he says. Hunter made several passes in front of the South Boston Postal Annex. “I’m guessing that he was firing,” says Hess, though it’s difficult to make out muzzle flashes on the 25 year old videotape that Hess posted on YouTube a few years ago.
The building in the background here is Gillette World Shaving Headquarters, immediately across the water from the Postal Annex:
Times Wire Services reported “Hunter’s flight took him over the Kenmore Square neighborhood, where the Boston Red Sox had just finished a game. Police found two shell casings nearby.” Hunter flew under the Tobin Bridge, shot at – and hit – the skywalk on the 50th floor of the Prudential Tower, and hit two cars in the nearby city of Lynn.
For almost three hours, Hunter prowled the skies. At 12:57 am on May 10th, he touched down at Logan Airport, but took off again. Officials cleared the control tower at Logan, and 17 minutes later, Hunter was back, landing at Logan for the final time with about five minutes worth of fuel left in the Cessna. After a brief struggle, Hunter was arrested, and later charged with murder and armed robbery. Police never recovered the weapon, but found several live rounds and spent shell casings in the plane.
At trial, Hunter admitted to killing his wife, but denied criminal responsibility, claiming that he lacked the capacity to form the requisite mental state to commit the crime due to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He was convicted and sentenced, and appealed the conviction in 1994 and again in 1998, but Hunter is still in custody in MCI Norfolk, a medium security prison a half hour west of Boston.
The NBC Nightly News report, along with about five minutes of cameraman Scott Hess’s raw footage, are in the YouTube video below:
