While taping a TV show saluting heroes, a flight attendant who helped stop the shoe bomber gets an SUV. She picked it up Tuesday.
By LEON M. TUCKER
Published June 4, 2003
CLEARWATER - The promise was simple. Cristina Jones assured her young son Ian that what happened to the passengers and crew on the jetliners that crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11 would not happen to their family.
Three months after Jones, a flight attendant, spoke those words, she was wrestling with a terrorist on American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami.
The single mother's arms were locked around the torso of a 29-year-old terrorist named Richard Reid as he struggled to light the fuse of explosives hidden in the soles of his sneakers.
"I think about that just about every day," said Jones, 41, of Safety Harbor. "Something will come up that will make me think about it."
When she takes off her shoes at the airport, for example, she thinks about it. It happens when she smells the sulfur from a burning match. The incident would take over her dreams at night.
But people are still thanking Jones for her heroics on Dec. 22, 2001.
Hyundai Motor America's thanks came in the form of a free black 2003 Hyundai Santa Fe LX. The automaker surprised Jones with the vehicle during a taping last month of ABC's the Wayne Brady Show, on which she appeared for a "hero" segment.
The $23,000 sport utility vehicle was delivered to Fitzgerald Auto Mall on U.S. 19, where she and Ian, now 8, picked it up Tuesday.
"We feel that she is an American hero," said Jeff Kelch, a manager at Fitzgerald. "She possibly saved 200 people's lives."
Jones, however, doesn't consider herself a hero.
"I did what I had to do," she said. "I did my job."
It all started with a burning smell wafting though the cabin.
Fellow flight attendant Hermis Moutardier alerted Jones to the man hunched over in Seat 29-A.
"He was hunched over working very hard to do something," she said as she mimicked his actions. "I knew it was something that needed to be stopped right away."
So she grabbed him in a backward bear hug and tried to yank him up.
"She is such an enormously wonderful person," said Kathleen Slaven, a friend. "But she's very strong and not a passive person - she got in there and stood up for what she believed in."
Reid, Jones said, continued to try lighting the match, and at one point bit her hand to try freeing himself.
That didn't work.
Instead, Jones yelled for help.
"There were, maybe, eight or nine men that descended on top of us," she remembered.
Passengers and crew members overpowered Reid, two doctors on board injected him with sedatives and the plane - escorted by two F-15 fighter jets - was diverted to Boston's Logan International Airport.
None of the 197 passengers and crew members was seriously hurt.
"The most important thing I wish people got out of what we went through is what our jobs are," she said. "We have a hard time doing our job because people don't recognize our authority."
"People need to take us seriously while we're up there."
Meanwhile, back home, Ian was reeling.
"I tried to explain to him that this wouldn't happen to us," Jones said. "Then three months later, he sees me getting out of an ambulance with my hand bandaged."
"It's got to be that much more frightening for him when I go to work," she added.
At the dealership Tuesday, Ian slurped a can of Mountain Dew and explained:
"When she got home, I said, "Mom, you lied to me."
"She said it wouldn't happen to me."
Because of his mother's ordeal then, he didn't want to go outside much and spent a lot more time in his room, Ian said.
But as time passed, it has become more fun to have a hero for a mom.
"It feels pretty good to know my mom is a hero," the third-grader said. "I mean, she saved 195 people."
