Despair Beneath His Wings

A troubled past may have led a teen to copy a suicide mission

When 15-year-old Charles Bishop commandeered a small plane on Jan. 5, his family's ghosts may have been seated beside him. In 1984, before he was born, his parents attempted twice to commit suicide together--once trying to stab each other--because they were denied a marriage license (his mother was then only 17). In 1986 they had Charles and got married, but divorced soon after when his father became an abusive husband. Charles and his mother moved around the country, and during the Gulf War she changed their name to Bishop to rid them of his father's Arabic surname, Bishara. But by the...

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