The Fort Pierce carpenter says he went through an emergency exit to smoke.
By JEAN HELLER
Published May 25, 2004
TAMPA - A Fort Pierce carpenter said he was just looking for a place to smoke last week before jumping 25 feet from a shuttle car track at Tampa International Airport to avoid being hit by a train.
"I was not trying to commit suicide, like they said on TV," Travis Lee Hall, 35, said Monday from his bed at St. Joseph's Hospital. "I'm a smoker. I didn't know you couldn't smoke in the airport. I just went out a door to have a cigarette."
The door was an emergency exit from the landside terminal leading to the walkway between the shuttle tracks from the terminal to Airside A.
Hall said he crossed the tracks several times but did not know what they were.
"I don't think I saw anything going by me," he said. "But then all of a sudden, I look up and this blue train is (getting close). I didn't have any choice but to jump, no matter how high it was. I think the train caught my foot and really flung me out there."
Hall suffered a fractured pelvis and hip and internal injuries, TIA spokeswoman Brenda Geoghagan said. She said it was not clear whether opening the emergency exit door triggered any alarms.
"It's a door that's used all the time by maintenance people," Geoghagan said.
Paramedics who treated Hall reported that his blood alcohol level was 0.298. A blood alcohol level of 0.350 is considered potentially deadly.
"I'd never been on a plane and I was nervous," said Hall, who has not been charged with a crime. "I had two or three Crown Royals during the flight. I didn't think I was drunk."
Geoghagan offered this account:
Hall arrived at the airport at 11:25 a.m. on a Southwest Airlines flight from Birmingham, Ala., and was ticketed to catch another Southwest flight to West Palm Beach at 3:35 p.m.
Sometime after 2 p.m. Hall used one of the landside terminal's emergency doors, adjacent to where passengers exit shuttles. The airport no longer posts guards on the exit sides of shuttles to stop passengers headed the wrong way.
Hall walked through the exit door and onto the platform that can be used for passenger evacuations from the shuttle cars and from the terminal building in case of fire.
At 2:25 p.m., Globe Security personnel checking boarding passes and photo IDs of passengers boarding the shuttles spotted Hall and notified airport operations.
The four cars of the two shuttles were stopped, and 31 passengers bound for the terminal and the airside walked to their destinations on the central concrete strip.
Witnesses told authorities that Hall left the Airside A shuttle tracks and walked across a gravel roof to the old Airside B location where contractors were working.
"They told him he wasn't supposed to be there and had to go back inside, and then they called the police," Geoghagan said.
Instead, Hall returned to the Airside A shuttle tracks where trains were running again. Several times during the episode, he climbed over a 4-foot fence with signs warning, "High Voltage," Geoghagan said.
"He jumped when he saw a train coming at him," she said. "He's fortunate that he landed on the grass and not on concrete. Still, he was pretty badly hurt."
Geoghagan said the incident did not raise security concerns because it involved an unauthorized exit from the terminal, not an unauthorized entry.
